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WORDSWORTH 

A STUDY IN MEMORY AND 
MYSTICISM 



BY 
SOLOMON F. GINGERIGH, A. M. 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN GOSHEN COLLEGE 



•I? 



Slkbart. Slubtana 

MENNONITE PUBLISHING COMPANY 
1908 






iUBHARY of C0NGBP.3S. 
Two Copies Htx^ttjC: 
MAR Piy08 
Ooiiyi.k'*'' cotry ^ 
I'M 5 ^-^^^^ 

Ij COHYfl. 



Copyright, 1908. 
By S. F. Gingerich. 



PREFACE 

Readers acquainted with the critical writings 
on Wordsworth will no doubt find much in this 
volume that is old and familiar, especially in 
Chapters I and II. It is hoped, however, that the 
treatment of this old and well-known material is 
sufficiently novel and original to warrant its 
appearance in print. Such novelty and originality 
are claimed for the bit of psychology brought out 
near the close of Chapter II, for the intermediary 
stages of mysticism as developed in Chapter V, for 
the renunciation of the mystical proper and yet the 
retention of the highest mystical intensity possible 
for artistic excellence as shown in Chapter VII, 
and for the attempt in Chapter VIII to answer 
the question how far and in what sense Words- 
worth is a philosopher. 

Perhaps more obvious than novelty and orig- 
inality is the indebtedness these pages show to 
various men and various writings. The existence 
of this volume in its present form is due in part 
to the work in an English Seminary on Words- 



wor(th in Indiana University, to the inspiration 
and personal help of Professor Will D. Howe, to 
the sympathetic and searching- criticism of Professor 
C. J. Sembower, to some valuable suggestions of 
Professor Alfred M. Brooks (members of the 
Faculty of Indiana University), and to the host 
of writers of the past century who have written 
well on William Wordsworth and his poetry. 

S. F. G. 

Goshen, Indiana. 
February, 1908. 



CONTENTS 



INTRODUCTION. 

CHAPTER I. 
The Man and His Times. 

CHAPTER II. 
Memories of Childhood : Their Development. 

CHAPTER III. 

Memories of Childhood : Their Ethical Meaning. 

CHAPTER IV. 
Memories of Childhood : Their Artistic Value. 

CHAPTER V. 

Mysticism : Its Development. 

CHAPTER VI. 
Mysticism : Its Ethical Meaning. 

CHAPTER VII. 
Mysticism : Its Artistic Value. 

CHAPTER VIII. 
Philosophy : Its Limitations. 

CHAPTER IX. 

Conclusion. 



INTRODUCTION 

It is the purpose of this study to trace tl>e 
development, in Wordsworth, of his psychology 1 
of childhood memories and his theory and practice \ 
of mysticism, and to show their relation to each ,1 
other and their relation indirectly to his poetry. 
This study is to be made mainly, if not wholly, 
in the light of the original qualities of Words- 
worth's character and of the times in which he 
lived — in the light of the action and reaction of 
the time upon the character. The chief emphasis, 
however, must be placed upon the development of 
his character. For whatever argument may be 
made in favor of the independence of art and 
morals, it can hardly be denied that the art products 
of Wordsworth have their sources deep in his 
moral being; and without a strong sense and 
appreciation of his moral nature, we cannot arrive 
at any just conclusion as to the peculiar influence 
the times exerted on him. Without the key to his 
character, all study of him is in vain. 

The excuses for undertaking such a task as here 



8 WORDSWORTH 

proposed are two. First, the genius of Wordsworth 
himself is so towering, and the period in which 
he spent his first thirty years, and especially the 
last ten of those years, is so replete with human 
interest, that, although a great literature has already 
sprung up dealing with the man and his times, this 
literature is not all written as yet, but will continue 
to be written in succeeding generations. Secondly, 
our progress in civilization depends upon the clear- 
ness of vision with which we perceive, and the 
energy with which we seize upon the greatest 
achievements of the race in the past, and especially 
the achievements of its geniuses. How well we 
can appropriate to our use the highest acquire- 
ments of past civilizations determines our success 
in the future. Thus, it is the duty of each 
generation in its own way to re-interpret for 
itself the vital elements of a past civilization. Per- 
haps this can be done in no better way than by 
the simple and time-honored method of observing 
the action and reaction of a great time upon a 
great character, with special reference to some 
phase of that character's thought and experience. 
And Wordsworth's time and Wordsworth's char- 
acter and the particular phase of his thought upon 
which we wish to dwell are all great enough to 
make unnecessary any further apologies. 



INTRODUCTION g. 

Whether we believe with Carlyle that geniuses 
are not made but are born, and assert themselves 
in spite of the conditions that birth and society 
may impose on them, or whether we believe with 
others that even geniuses are but mouthpieces of 
their own time-spirit, or whether we take a middle 
ground and say that somehow both the power of 
the moment and the power of the man are neces- 
sary for the most excellent achievement, we can 
perhaps agree that a great poet, by virtue of his 
sensitive, responsive, and sympathetic nature, is 
more indebted to his age than other men, and that 
by virtue of his imaginative and creative powers 
he makes the world indebted to himself more than 
other men do. And notwithstanding the fact that 
throughout his whole life, Wordsworth drew much 
of his light and joy from within and became a 
conservative rather early in life, setting himself in 
opposition to mechanical and industrial progress, 
to the Reform Bill of 1832, to the introduction of 
railways, to formal education, to the Catholic 
Emancipation, etc., there is still much reason to 
believe that he is in no sense an outstanding fact 
of his day and generation, but that he is essentially 
a part of it, first absorbing its vital elements, and 
secondly reacting upon those elements and giving 
them new direction of development. The man who- 



10 WORDSWORTH 

could say, as Wordsworth did say, in speaking of 
an experience as early in youth as when he first 
remembered the sun and the waters — 

Oh, then, the calm 
And dead still water lay upon my mind 
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, 
Never before so beautiful, sank down 
Into my heart and held me like a dream — 

and who could say of a later experience — an 
-experience caused by the declaration of war by 
England against France — 

No shock 
Given to my moral nature had I known 
Down to that very moment ; neither lapse 
Nor turn of sentiment that might be named 
A revolution, save at this one time : — 

such a man shows that he was at least extremely 
susceptible to two great objective and environ- 
mental forces that play upon men's lives and help 
to mold their characters — the forces of external 
nature and organized human society. * 
But Wordsworth held that 

Poets, even as prophets, each with each 
Connected in a mighty scheme of truth, 
Have each his own peculiar faculty, 
Heaven's gift, a sense that fits him to perceive 
Objects unseen before. 



INTRODUCTION ii 

He believed that 

Happy is he who lives to understand 
Not human nature only, but explores 
All natures — to the end that he may find 
The law that governs each — ■ 

and that 

The array 
Of act and circumstance, and visible form. 
Is mainly to the pleasure of the mind 
What passion makes them. — 

And the man who could boldly proclaim that it 
is the legitimate btisiness of a poet to explore all 
natures in order to find the law that governs each, 
that it should be his ideal to perceive objects 
unseen before and to color the array of act and 
circumstance and visible form with the passions 
of the mind itself, must have possessed an original 
force of mind that retained its identity throughout 
his whole career, even though he was extremely 
susceptible to objective and environmental forces. 
And yet, one is constrained to ask, Whence come 
these bold assertions of the high and far-reaching- 
purposes and ideals of the poet? Why especially 
should Wordsworth believe it to be a peculiar 
faculty of the poet to perceive objects unseen 
before? How did he come to feel that the poet 
should discover the law that governs all natures 



12 WORDSWORTH 

and at the same time attempt to color the array 
of act and circumstance and visible form with the 
passions of his own mind? It is quite clear that 
these statements of his are not only an indication 
of a strong individuality, but are distinctive echoes 
of a particular time — a time when men, as> 
DeQuincey says, were forced to think, and par- 
ticularly to think on the first principles of things 
and to take sides on almost all the questions of 
the day, a time when men were encouraged to give- 
full expression to their individual experiences in- 
stead of repressing them, a time, in short, more 
or less revolutionary, which made men earnest 
exponents and apostles of new faiths and various 
and oftentimes conflicting theories. Would even 
a Wordsworth have given expression to just these 
sentiments had he lived in the time of Pope? 
And is it fanciful to ask, in passing, whether it 
is not a significant fact that Wordsworth was about 
thirty-four years old, in the prime of life, feeling, 
the full measure of native strength and unusual 
vigor of soul, when he gave expression to these 
and other similar sentiments? 

It is always impossible, however, to determine 
with exactness how much of the product of a poet 
is due to personal and how much to environmentar 
forces. The subtle and intangible nature of the 



INTRODUCTION 13 

spirit of the times and the inexplicable qualities 
and powers of the genius preclude the possibility 
of the scientist ever givang an exact formula for 
the influence of the environment on the individual 
and the individual on the environment, respectively. 
Moreover, historical study is as helpless in this 
respect as science. There are many events and 
incidents that play a part in the making of any 
period of history which are beyond the power of 
discovery of the historian. Besides there are 
motives and impulses beneath and behind the facts 
of history, which themselves give the facts a color- 
ing of their own, so that the conscientious historian 
can never be absolutely positive of his results, and 
he is often driven to call in the imagination to fill 
in at points where facts escape him. Again, in a 
time of great political and social disturbances, when 
the genius of a people or the spirit of the times 
work deeply and vitally on an individual, much of 
these workings are unconscious. Accidental afifairs 
and events that have a temporary influence proclaim 
their presence with a noise and a flourish that can- 
not be mistaken. On the other hand, the vital 
forces of such a time are exactly those that are 
the most pervasive and the most subtle, and it is 
the special gift of the genius to divine the difference 
between the accidental on the one hand and the 



14 WORDSWORTH 

vital on the other, and to identify himself whole- 
heartedly with the latter. Thus in dealing with our 
problem, which is at bottom the problem of the 
philosophy of history, the historian, like the scien- 
tist, can obtain only partial and inadequate results. 
The literary critic can not come any nearer the 
solution of the problem than either the scientist 
or the historian except so far only as he can success- 
fully combine the method of the scientist and the 
knowledge of the historian with his own special 
faculty of sensibility to his work in hand. But 
this advantage is immediately offset by another 
difficulty, peculiar to the problem of the literary 
critic. The history of the development of poetry 
is harder to trace than is, for example, the history 
of philosophic thought. Philosophy deals mainly 1 
with intellectual matters, matters that have to do 1 
with theories and with systems. And many of 
these systems are more or less sharply defined and 
are differentiated from other systems, and, there- 
fore, their development can be traced with cotfi- 
parative ease. Poetry, on the other hand, deals 
more generally with personal experiences, and with 
the instincts and intuitions and feelings of common 
humanity. Whatever else a great poetry may deal 
with, it deals, first of all, with the deep, abiding 
and universal experiences of tb.e heart, which ex- 



INTRODUCTION 15 

periences are much the same in all places and in 
all ages. It is possible, therefore, for a great 
poetry to spring up directly from the soil, as it 
were, and its relation to other great poetry may 
be hard to find, if, indeed, it have any important 
relation to it at all. 

Let the proposition be stated from another point 
of view. A philosopher, like Hume, holds that one [ 
should not believe in immortality. His philosophic 
system develops this thoroughly and systematically. 
But when Hume thinks of his mother he says he 
cannot believe that her character can ever suffer 
dissolution. Why is there this difference in attitude 
in the same man ? Simply that in the former case 
he speaks from a purely intellectual standpoint and 
in accord with a developed system and a school 
to which he belongs, while in the latter case he 
allows his affections to play a part in his experience. 
In the first instance he speaks like a philosopher ; 
in the second, like a man. The first view accords 
with the views of a certain school of philosophers 
with a particular skeptical bias, and the origin and 
development of the view can be traced easily 
enough. But the second view accords with the 
common experience of humanity, and, as such, has , 
no particular history. And it is precisely this 
second kind of experience that gives the poet the 



i6 WORDSWORTH 

matter with which he deals. Poetry is related to 
the times out of which it comes as a river is related 
to the country in which it has its source and 
thr&ugh which it flows — distinctly individual, it 
yet carries in itself something of the very soil and 
substance of the regions through which it has 
traveled. And the poet's relation to his time is 
like that of a tree to the soil from which it springs 
— its marrow and strength and volume are drawn 
from the very elements that surround it and 
threaten its destruction, but in the process the 
elements themselves undergo a mysterious change 
by means of the vital force in the tree itself. 
Though the relation between a poet and his time 
is always vital, it is also always extremely pervasive 
and intangible, consisting for the most part of deep 
under-current connections. 

And since it is thus, there have always been 
some literary critics who have given up in despair 
to carry out such a program as here suggested. 
They have contented themselves with giving critigal 
expositions of particular works, or, at most, they 
have included in their criticism the consideration 
of the character of the poet in relation to his works. 
A few have even discouraged this latter and 
especially any larger problem, because the results 
obtained are correspondingly less exact and final. 



INTRODUCTION 17 

And for these reasons there will perhaps always 
be a minority of literary critics of this stamp. But 
should a method be given up because it yields only 
partial and relative results? Should we not rather 
distrust as superficial, a method that strictly limits 
itself to a chosen sphere and then attempts final 
and absolute answers to all questions that arise 
within that sphere? And though it be insisted upon 
that our problem shall be developed in the broadest 
possible way, it will no doubt be seen by this time 
that there is no intention here to present the 
detailed facts of Wordsworth's outward life. It 
is intended, on the contrary, to trace out the inward 
evolution of his character. And it will also be 
seen that it is not the purpose here to set down an 
array of historical facts pertaining to the times, 
nor to trace out temporal influences to their origins. 
Such facts and influences and origins can be found 
written in the books, and it would be a thankless 
task to restate them here. But it is intended to 
seize upon a few of the most essential and funda- 
mental characteristics of the times and to use those 
characteristics in conjunction with the enfoldnient 
of Wordsworth's character, with the hope of giving 
a more detailed and complete psychological 
explanation than has hitherto been given of his 
introspective tendencies that became embodied in 



i8 WORDSWORTH 

his doctrine of childhood memories and in his 
theory and practice of mysticism. It is to be shown 
that these tendencies were not only peculiar to 
him, but that they were peculiarly influenced in 
their development by his environment. 



^ 



CHAPTER I 



THE MAX AND HIS TIMES 



What, then, are the chief characteristics of the 
times and the vital qualities in Wordsworth's 
character with which we must begin our study? 
The most general formula for those times is that 
they were times of revolution with a strong i 
tendency toward the readjustment of society, and 
of insistence on personal liberty with the result 
of giving wide divergence in the expression of 
personal experience. This formula is not intended 
to be in any sense a complete expression of those 
characteristics. One needs but to glance at the 
literature dealing with this period of time to notice 
the futile efforts of writers in their attempt to | 
express in single phrases the forces and tendencies 
then at work. Some of the phrases include so much [ 
that they are vague ; others are so specific that 
they do not include enough. "A time of growing 



20 WORDSWORTH 

intolerance of antiquated and artificial forms," a 
time of "reaction on eighteenth century civiliza- 
tion," of a "return to nature," of "simplification," 
a time of the "recreation of medievalism," of the 
"rediscovery and vindication of the concrete," a 
time of "a sudden increase of the vital energy of 
the species," a time of "growth in the notion of the 
brotherhood of man," a time of the "strengthening 
of the national consciousness of the different coun- 
tries of Europe" — all these are partial failures and 
partial successes ; they fail to give an adequate 
conception of the times ; they succeed in expressing 
some important aspects of them. The complexity 
of forces then at work makes it impossible ever 
to express those forces in a single phrase. And 
perhaps our own formula can claim no more than 
the statement of a few important aspects of the 
times. They are such aspects, however, as will be 
shown to have the most important bearing on the 
development of Wordsworth's experiences regard- 
ing the memories of childhood and mysticism. 

Moreover, the forces included in our formula 
are among the most vital and permanent of the 
times. Though many of the others, such as a 
"return to nature" and the "rediscovery and vin- 
dication of the concrete," have done their work, 
those included in our formula have still not spent 



THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 21 

their energy, even though a hundred years span 
the time between then and now. Our times arc 
still re\-olutionary, only in a milder sense, but even ) 
with an increased effort at the readjustment of 
society ; and, although we may not proclaim per- 
sonal liberty with the same vehemence as men did 
a hundred years ago, yet the divergence of the 
expression of personal experience is greater than/ 
ever, and is ever widening. The times of Words- 
worth initiated and gave a tremendous impetus 
to tw^o forces that characterize the whole of the 
nineteenth century, the forces, namely, of increased 
efficiency and adjustment of organized society, and 
the widened powers and range of personal liberty. 
The revolutionary forces of those days were by 
no means confined to the settlement and readjust- 1 
ment of political problems. They invaded all the 
departments of human affairs, even the affairs of 
practical religion. In a preface to a sonnet written 
in 1827, Wordsworth makes this suggestive state- 
ment, "Attendance at church on prayer-days, 
Wednesdays and Fridays and Holidays, received 
a shock at the Revolution. It is now, however, 
happily reviving." The spirit of revolution was in 
the atmosphere, and it found its way into every 
nook and corner of town and hamlet, and most 
of all into the hearts of men : 



22 WORDSWORTH i 

'Twas in truth an hour 
Of universal ferment, mildest men 
Were agitated ; and commotions, strife t 

Of passion and opinion filled the walls 
Of peaceful houses with unquiet sound. 

Dominant in all the activities of the times was 
the note of an equilibrium less secure than in the 
period of time preceding, of an old anchorage 
breaking up, of maladjustments and instabilities, 
and, at the same time, of promises and potencies 
of a slow but ever higher development. By the 
shock of the Revolution men were compelled to 
revert to first principles, to explore all natures in 
order to find the law that governs each. And when, 
in the presence of danger, a man sinks deeply into 
himself to discover the grounds upon which to 
think and act, he not only finds his own opinions 
to diverge from those of others, but he also gathers 
courage for his own convictions. Such was the 
experience of Wordsworth in the time of the 
Revolution. But while the insecure equilibrium 
and the maladjustments of the times encouraged 
and reinforced the expression of personal experience, 
they also tended to produce the excess of individual- 
ism, false perspectives of life, wild theories and 
unattainable ideals. They account in part, it has 
been alleged and rightly, for the incoherencies of 



THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 23 

Shelley and the terrific convulsions of Byron. But S 
do they not also in part account for .the "amazing 
inequalities" in Wordsworth that have been the 
wonder of critics from that day to this? It is the 
misfortune, or the fortune, of the great and the 
good to understand the burdens and the sorrows 
of a people and to bear those burdens and sorrows 
in their own hearts. (Is it not indeed by virtue of 
this sympathetic understanding and this burden- 
bearing that posterity gives them the title of great- 
ness and goodness?) And when those burdens are 
exceptionally heavy and those sorrows profoundly 
deep, do they not leave their scars in the characters 
of even the greatest? As our theme unfolds, we 
shall be ^able to watch the dramatic interplay of 
the spirit of the times and the character of the man 
until we arrive at the psychological and mystical 
attitude toward life that is both characteristic of 
the man and a natural outcome of the troubled 
times in which he lived. 

Since we have now before us the chief character- 
istics of the times, let us next consider the qualities 
of mind that were original with Wordsworth ( 
and that remained a personal possession with him 
through life. The powers that were given to him 
by nature and inheritance were the powers of 
passion with extreme sensitiveness, and volition 



24 WORDSWORTH 

with a moral predisposition. Like our formula for 
the spirit of the times, this is not intended to be 
a complete formulation of all of Wordsworth's 
excellent gifts of mind. Besides these, for example, 
( he possessed an imagination that was not only 
; "essentially scientific, and quite unlike the fancy 
that decorates and falsifies fact to gratify an idle 
mind with a sense of neatness and ingenuity," but 
an imagination that was penetrating and con- 
templative and that saw, in a very great measure, 
the "soul of truth in every part" of the object of 
its vision. Yet, though it is hard to establish 
precedences in the order of development, it seems 
to be peculiarly true of Wordsworth that his 
imagination is the product of these more elemental 
powers of our formula. At any rate, it is the com- 
bination of these elemental powers which furnish 
the nucleus of his moral and intellectual being and 
give the key to his character. 

In writing to a friend in 1792, the sister of 
Wordsworth says, "William has .... a sort of 
violence of affection, if I may so term it, which 
demonstrates itself every moment of the day, when 
the objects of his afifection are present with him, 
in a thousand almost imperceptible attentions to 
their wishes, in a sort of restless watchfulness 
which I know not how to describe, a tenderness 



THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 25 

that never sleeps." With keen penetration Miss 
Wordsworth points out the basic elements in the 
character of her brother. "Restless watchfulness," 
"a tenderness that never sleeps," and "violence of 
affection" are the chief characteristics of it. The 
key words are watchfulness, tenderness, and vio- 
lence. And this characterization accords remark- 
ably with Wordsworth's description of his own 
childhood character, given to his intended biog- 
rapher many years later. He says, "I was of a 
stifif, moody, violent temper." Allowing for some 
freedom in the use of terms, these characteristics 
may be respectively dignified (as, indeed, they were 
dignified in Wordsworth's manhood) into volition, 
sensitiveness, and passion. The stiffness of temper 
of his childhood grew into the "restless watchful- 
ness" of his youth, and matured into that thorough- 
going volition which directed the events of his 
whole after-life; the moodiness of his childhood 
grew, under the forming agency of the will, into 
the "tenderness that never sleeps" of his youth, and 
flowered into that exquisite sensitiveness character- 
istic of his whole subsequent career; while the 
violent temper of his childhood grew into the 
"violent affections" of his youth, and, tempered In' 
the influence of a masterful will, finally bore fruit 
a hundred fold in the deepest and most thoroughly 



26 WORDSWORTH 

subdued passions of any literary man in the world. 
Passion, sensitiveness, volition — these were the 
powers that were with him when a child hidden 
away among the silences of the Westmoreland hills, 
long before the terrible rumblings of the French 
Revolution broke upon his ears. Wordsworth 
attests to the possession of them in his childhood : 

I cannot paint (he says) 
What then I was. The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion ; the tall rock, 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
Their colors and their forms, were then to me 
An appetite ; a feeling and a love, 
That had no need of a remoter charm, 
By thought supplied, nor any interest 
Unborrowed from the eye. 

There were not only "aching joys" and "dizzy 
raptures" with the child, but he was strangely 
sensitive to all objects. Before he was ten years 
old he would range through half the night among 
the mountain slopes and on the "open heights where 
woodcocks run along the smooth green turf," and 
would ply his anxious visitation : 

Sometimes it befell 
In those night wanderings, that a strong desire 
O'erpowered my better reasoh, and the bird 
Which was the captive of another's toil 
Became my prey; and when the deed was done 



THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 27 

I heard among the solitary hills 
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds 
Of undistinguishable motion, steps 
Almost as silent as the turf they trod. 

This not only expresses the child's sensitiveness 
■of mind, but also contains the germ of a moral 
disposition. The silent steps, the sounds of un- 
distinguishable motion and the low breathings 
■coming after him were due mainly to the deed he 
had committed. In speaking of a time before he 
■was seventeen, he says : 

But let this 

Be not forgotten, that I still retained 

My first creative sensibility ; 

That by the regular action of the world 

My soul was unsubdued. 

Tie not only retained his creative sensibility 
throughout, but he very early in youth learned 
through the strength of his will to keep his soul 
from being subdued "by the regular action of the 
world." And in the earliest of those days his strong 
will, similar to that of other boys with strong wills, 
manifested itself in the form of wilfulness and 
even stubbornness. His mother once told an 
intimate friend of hers that the only one of her 
five children about whose future life she was 
anxious was William, and that he would be remark- 
able either for good or for evil. But the deposit of 



28 WORDSWORTH 

moral conviction in his constitution was easily 
sufficient to save him from his mother's anxious, 
fears and to give him not only the will to live, but 
to live morally, to realize the better alternative of 
his mother's prophecy, and become remarkable only 
for good. 

These same powers of passion, sensitiveness and 
volition were with him in his youth. If any further 
testimony than that of his sister, which is clear 
and unmistakable, is needed, it can be found in his 
early attitude toward the French Revolution. It 
especially illustrates his volitional activity. We 
all know the difference in effect on us of two 
characters, one of whom orders the activities of 
his life toward some definite end and always moves 
in a straight line when the direction is once chosen, 
and the other of whom is frequently at variance 
with himself and is easily turned from any course 
by accident or circumstance. The first impresses 
us as having will and volition. The latter as lack- 
ing will and volition. Now, Wordsworth, whose 
temperament from childhood was somewhat "stiff," 
was very slow in choosing a direction of activity, 
but when it was once chosen he held to it with a 
tenacity equalled by very few men. As the 
Prelude shows and as Myers in his book on Words- 
worth has well demonstrated, Wordsworth for a 



THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 29 

time accepted the French Revolution as a matter 
of course, without being deeply stirred. But even 
after he was thoroughly aroused and his "inmost 
soul was agitated," and he could almost 

Have prayed that throughout earth upon all men, 
....The gift of tongues might fall, and power arrive 

From the four quarters of the winds to do 

For France, what without help she could not do, 

A work of honor ; — 

•even then he was slow to throw himself into the 
cause. He checked and interrogated his emotions. 
It was his wont always to hold his erhotions in 
restraint. He would not decide blindly, he would 
wait for light : 

A mind whose rest 

Is where it ought to be, in self-restraint. 

In circumspection and simplicity. 

Falls rarely in entire discomfiture 

Below its aim, or meets with, from without, 

A treachery that fails it or defeats. 

But finally, when he felt sure of the worthiness of 
the cause, he gave himself, not partly or stingily, 
iDut whole-heartedly, to it. He was then for France, 
out and out. And when once this decision had 
been reached, no one but as strong-willed and 
resolute a person as Wordsworth himself can 
realize what a shock his moral and sensitive nature 
must have sustained when his hopes for France 



30 • WORDSWORTH 

were blasted. Wordsworth was a man who 
accepted great human issues seriously. He believed 
in what truth he possessed as few men believe in 
truth. And when once in his life he was compelled 
to witness the complete and absolute failure of 
his highest hopes, it was by means of a slow and 
painful process that he readjusted himself tO' 
another course. Had his desire to see the truth 
victorious been less intense, had the issues at stake 
in France been taken to heart less seriously, had 
his will in the matter been less strong, he would 
have passed through the moral crisis with cor- 
respondingly greater ease. So important is this- 
crisis that it must be considered more in detail in 
another connection. It has been cited here merely- 
as a proof of Wordsworth's tenacity of mind and 
unexcelled volitional and moral temper in youth. 
But these same powers of passion with sensitive- 
ness and volition with a moral predisposition were 
with him in his mature years and manifest them- 
selves in his maturest works. Though we cannot 
pluck the heart out of Wordsworth's mystery, it 
is quite certain that it lies in the direction of his. 
wonderful sensitiveness to the simple and elemental 
forces of life, his insight into them, his firm grasp 
on them, and his power of compelling the reader 
to feel them, colored as they always are by his own 



THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 31 

moral disposition. The following familiar passage : 

I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, ^ 

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, '■^ 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and the mind of man ; 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts 
And rolls through all things — 

does not primarily owe its strength and wonder 
to any new and original philosophical conception 
imderlying it. The conception that there is a uni- 
fied and living spirit back of all things and in and 
through all things, is as old as the thinking race. 
But this passage owes its uniqueness and fame 
almost wholly to the mysterious vitality of volition. 
The power of it is due to the intimacy of the 
presence, to the fact that the presence disturbs one's 
inmost being. One is compelled to feel the motion 
and the spirit that impels, all things. If there is 
any new philosophical conception here at all, it is 
the conception of vital movement — of attributing 
volition to the goings-on of the universe. It should 
be remembered that the chief part of Wordsworth's 
definition of a poet, is, that he is "a man pleased 
with his own passions and volitions, and who re- 



22 WORDSWORTH 

joices more than other men in the spirit of life 
that is in him ; delighting to contemplate similar 
volitions and passions as manifested in the 
goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled 
to create them where he does not find them." And 
this passage of poetry is an illustration of his 
definition. It deepens immeasurably one's sense 
of the vital and sublime energies of volition — 
volition in the vast spaces of the universe without 
and in the heart and mind of man within. It is 
not dramatic, but it is dynamic ; and, though 
Wordsworth possessed little of the power of char- 
acterization and dramatic presentation, there is, 
nevertheless, an undercurrent of motion in his 
poetry which is at once an essential source of his 
power. It seems to be a sublimation of activit}' 
but expressed with such a strong grasp on reality 
that its force is extremely effective. 

In the little poem, "She Was a Phantom," there 
is drawn a woman that is "a spirit, yet a woman too" : 

She was a Phantom of delight 

When first she gleamed upon my sight. 

This character does not impress one with the 
(|ualities of color, concreteness, flesh and blood, 
and the like, for she is too phantom-like and 
sublimated to possess these qualities. But she 
impresses one with a very different kind of 



THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 33 

reality. She "gleams" upon one's sight. There is 
intense and vital movement inherent in 

Her household motions light and free 
And steps of virgin liberty — 

and the vitality of her motions is directly felt as 
a reality by the reader. She is 

A perfect woman, nobly planned 
To warn, to comfort, and command. 

She is at once the embodiment of spiritual sublima- 
tion and reality, and her power over us lies in the 
complete fusion of these two opposite forces in her 
character by means of the mysterious vitality and 
intensity of the poet's volition. 

It may be remarked, in passing, that perhaps 
the most favorite words of Wordsworth, especially 
during the period of his greatest literary production, 
are the words "motion" and "gleam" with their 
\arious adjectival and verbal forms, together with 
words of kindred meaning — words at once dynamic 
and volitional. In addition to the examples already 
given, a few more must suffice: 

To cut across the reflex of a star 

That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed 

Upon the glassy plain. 

Even then I felt 

Gleams like the flashing of a shield. 



-34 WORDSWORTH 

And add the gleam, 

The light that never was, on sea or land. 

Lighted by gleams of moonlight from the sea 
We beat with thundering hoofs the level sand. 

Now is crossed by gleatn 
V Of his own image, by a sunbeam now 

And wavering motions sent he knows not whence. 

Sounds of undistinguishable motion — 

No motion but the moving tide, a breeze — 

All the shadowy banks on either side 

Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still 

The rapid line of motion. 

Ye motions of delight that haunt the sides 
Of the green hills. 

From the blessed power that rolls 
About, below, above. 

No motion has she now, no force. 
She neither hears nor sees. 
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course 
With rocks, and stones, and trees. 

Those hallowed and pure motions of the sense — 

On the first motion of a holy thought — 

And all the tender motions of the soul — 

Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought 
That gives to forms and images a breath 
And everlasting motion. 



THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 35 

Listen ! the mighty Being is awake, 
And doth with his eternal motion make 
A sound like thunder — everlastingly. 



This list might very easily be extended. Too 
much emphasis, however, should not be placed 
upon the point that these are favorite words with 
Wordsworth. And unless the point immediately 
commends itself to the student familiar with 
Wordsworth's poetry, it is of little value. It can 
nevertheless be seen from these passages that 
W.ordsworth, in a very peculiar sense, attributes 
vital movement, not only to all the objects of the 
outer world, but also to the senses, the thoughts, 
and the soul of man, and even to God. And the 
mere act of pronouncing repeatedly the words, 
"gleam" and "motion" and "roll" in the sense 
Wordsworth uses them, gives a healthy and volun- 
tary thrill to the soul. 

In the great lyrical poetry of Wordsworth, then, 
there is not the purely lyrical strain which arises ( 
simply from a mood or a feeling. Nor in his great 
narrative poetry is there anything like the purely 
dramatic power. But alike in both his lyrical and 
narrative poetry there is a union of feeling and 
force, of mood and self-control, of emotion and 
volition. 



36 WORDSWORTH 

r 
/ And volition has two functions to fulfil in 

the production of Wordsworth's poetry. He him- 
self says that "poetry is the spontaneous over- 
flow of powerful feelings : it takes its origin from 
emotion recollected in tranquility ; the emotion is 
contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the 
tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, 
kindred to that which was before the subject of 
contemplation, is gradually produced, and does it- 
self actually exist in the mind. In this mood 
successful composition generally begins and in a 
mood similar to this it is carried on." First, the 
will, by a species of reaction, whips a recollected 
emotion into a state of excitement, and secondly, 
the overflow of the powerful emotion thus excited 
must be held under restraint as it enters into the 
making of a poetic composition. Though this theory 
for the production of poetry is by no means true for 
the production of all successful composition, it is 
certainly a careful and exact transcript of what 
took place in the conscious part of Wordsworth's 
own mind. And since it is not merely the descrip- 
tion of an intellectual process, but involves the 
activities of passion and volition as well as intellect, 
it offers an excellent insight into Wordsworth's 
whole nature and character. His was a life of 
continuous "high endeavors" at "plain living and 



THE MAN AND HIS TIMES - 37 

high thinking," conscious and purposive. To every- 
thing he did he imparted a touch of volition. Even 
his "wise passiveness'' requires a certain mental 
alertness that does not belong to a lazy man, since 
it iM'esupposes more or less conscious effort. In 
the early days of Wordsworthian criticism Anbrey 
De \'ere made a noble plea for Wordsworth's 
possession of passion. He says, "The whole of 
Wordsworth's nature was impassioned, body and 
spirit, intellect and imagination." The reason for 
the necessity for such a plea was that Wordsworth 
was so completely the master of his passions that 
unsympathetic critics at once alleged that he did 
not possess any. In Wordsworth's mature years 
the will always dominates the feelings. "There is 
volition and self-government in every line of his 
poetry," says Hutton, and there is likewise volition 
and self-government in every act of his life. It is 
with him as though there were a great underground 
reservoir of passion. But the reservoir is so deeply 
and firmly set in adamant that there is no possible 
chance for an explosion to occur. 

There is something of the wariness of a logician 
in Wordsworth's statement. "Had I been a writer 
of love-poetry it would have been natural to me 
to write with a degree of warmth which could 
hardly have been approved by my principles, and 




38 WORDSWORTH 

which might have been undesirable for the reader." 
Like the logician who is, more than others, con- 
scious of the limitations of logic, Wordsworth, the 
man of volitions and self-government, is constantly 
aware of the limits of the power of self-control ; 
and like the logician again who is forever dealing 
with matter that is refractory to logic, Wordsworth 
is always dealing with forces that lie just outside 
of his control, with intuitive impulses, with acts 
in which "we associate ideas in a state of excite- 
ment," with half-conscious forces that are defiant 
to the subordination of the mind, yet do not over- 
whelm its conscious self-possession. In close juxta- 
position to a passage in the Fourth Book of the 
Prelude in which he emphasizes the independent 
and self-directing power of the soul — 

How life pervades the undecaying mind; 
How the immortal soul with God-like power 
Informs, creates, and thaws the deepest sleep 
That time can lay upon her — 

there is this passage, which tells of half-conscious 
influences, to the finer influx of which his sensitive 
"mind lay open to a more exact and close com- 
munion" : 

Around me from among the hazel leaves, 

Now here, now there, moved by the straggling wind. 



THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 39 

Came ever and anon a breath-like sound, 
Quick as the pantings of a faithful dog, 
The off-and-on companion of my walk; 
And such, at times, believing them to be, 
I turned my head to look if he were there ; 
Then into solemn thought I passed once more. 

With the soul's subordination of powers like these 
— pervasive, yet only half-conscious — Wordsworth 
was constantly dealing, but with the passion of 
love, which is sufficiently strong and self-conscious 
to require a degree of warmth in treatment that 
could hardly be approved by his principles, and 
which is likely to invade the power of self- 
control, he refused to deal directly. Though he 
acknowledged that 

Love, blessed Love is everywhere 
The spirit of my song — 

yet he preferred to keep so far from the border line 
of conflict between passionate love and self-control 
that he would always be absolutely sure of the 
supremacy of the latter. But he who would aspire 
to fathom the "depth" of the human soul and at the 
same time remain human-hearted, must also be 
willing to sound its "tumult." Wordsworth, how- 
ever, consistently refused to do the latter, which 
resulted not only in a distinct loss of human- 
heartedness, but also in the gain of a certain con- 



40 WORDSWORTH 

scious self-mastery which is at once the source of 
both his weakness and his strength, 

A precaution must be thrown out at this point. 
It is not intended in these pages to convey the 
idea that Wordsworth's best and most character- 
istic poems were the product of self-directed effort 
and the "conscious conquests of insight." There 
is at bottom no contradiction in saying that there 
is volition and self-government in every line of his 
poetry and that at the same time in his best poetry 
nature not only gave him the matter of his best 
poems, but also wrote his poems for him. For, 
just as psychologists of late years have disproved 
the old idea that animals have more instincts than 
man, and have shown that man's richer nature has 
a much greater variety of instincts than animals 
and besides possesses higher powers of reason 
which overlay those instincts and of which animals 
know very little ; so it may be conceived analo- 
gously that a nature like Wordsworth's may have 
a great variety of instinctive and spontaneous qual- 
ities and still possess a more than usual amount of 
self-consciousness and self-government, overlaying, 
as it were, those spontaneous activities. Self- 
possession and spontaneity are thus not mutually 
exclusive, but may both be abounding in a genius 
of a volitional type. This seems to be the truth in 



THE MAN AND HIS TIMES ■ 41 

the case of Wordsworth. His strength, frorii this 
point of view, lies in the happy co-operation, at rare 
moments, of self-possession and spontaneity. This 
co-operation is of such a rare and generally 
unattainable sort that we should not expect 
Wordsworth to attain to it always, but to fail at 
times, as indeed he does, on the side of spontaneity. 
How^ these unconscious and spontaneous elements 
are wrought into artistic structures we may never 
know from the very fact that they are unconscious 
and spontaneous. In his prefaces to his poems 
Wordsworth does not make enough allowance for 
the part they actually play in the making of his^ 
poetry. But in those same prefaces, on the other 
hand, he gives the most accurate and profound 
descriptions of what took place consciously in his ( 
own mind, and, as such, the prefaces are invaluable,./ 
not only as a criticism of the conscious side of his 
art, but as giving us excellent insights into his 
character. 

We have now seen that the powers that were- 
with Wordsworth in childhood, in youth, and in 
his luature life, were the powers of passion with 
extreme sensitiveness, and volition with a moral ( 
predisposition ; that these powers were the nucleus / 
of his moral and intellectual being and are the key ' 
to his character. We have also seen that the spirit 



42 WORDSWORTH 

of the times in which Wordsworth Hved was a/ 
spirit of revolution with serious efforts of men to\ 
readjust society on a higher level, and a spirit off 
personal liberty resulting in a wide divergence in 
the expression of personal experience. How these 
forces conspired together in developing the theory 
of childhood memories is to be the theme of the 
next chapter of this study. 



CHAPTER II 

MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD: THEIR 
DEVELOPMENT 

When Wordsworth, in his mature years, looked 
back over the passionate life of his childhood he 
felt that he had then lived too much the life of 
the senses. He says in the Prelude : 

I speak in recollection of a time 
When the bodily eye, in every stage of life 
The most despotic of our senses, gained 
Such strength in vie as often held my mind 
In absolute dominion. 

He very kindly and genially ascribes his mind's 
redemption from this thralldom to the powers of 
nature, and suggests that if he cared to enter upon 
^'abtruser argument," he could "unfold the means 
which nature studiously employs to thwart this 
tyranny." Whatever the agency by which this 
tyranny was thwarted, it is quite certain that by 
the time he was writing the Prelude his own mind 
was a safeguard against any such tyranny, and 
that, too, without the agency of natural forces. 



44 WORDSWORTH 

Just as he resisted the power of passionate love 
to master his will, so he carefully guarded against 
the despotism of the senses and even looked with 
a jealous eye upon their despotism in his childhood. 
He had now shaken off the domineering habit o£ 
the senses : 

I had known 
Too forcibly, too early in my life, 
Visitings of imaginative power 
For this to last : I shook the habit off 
Entirely and forever, and again 
In Nature's presence stood, as now I stand, 
A sensitive being, a creative soul. 

And he had now become the example of his own 
text : 

Man, if he do but live within the light 
Of high endeavors, daily spreads abroad 
His being armed with strength that cannot fail. 

With a mind that was sensitive and creative and 
that constantly lived in the light of high endeavors,. 
Wordsworth had attained to a large and glorious 
personal freedom. He was like a man on a high 
eminence overlooking a broad expanse of country. 
The slightest change of position presents views of 
objects remote from each other and varied in kind 
and nature. He was like the Solitary of his ownr 
Excursion, who in the wilds of America 



MEMORIES Of CHILDHOOD 45 

Having gained the top 
Of some commanding eminence, which yet 
Intruder ne'er beheld, he thence surveys 
Regions of wood and wide savannah, vast 
Expanse of unappropriated earth. 
With mind that sheds a light on what he sees ; 
Free as the sun and lonely as the sun. 
Pouring above his head its radiance down 
Upon a living and rejoicing world ! 

And thus, with a mind that shed light on what it 
•saw and that was as free as the sun and oftentimes 
as lonely as the sun, Wordsworth had attained a 
high vantage ground from which to explore nature 
and human life. But in this unusual self-mastery 
•of his there was wrapped up the weakness of the 
man as well as his strength. And among those 
weaknesses is certainly that of arbitrariness. 
Arbitrary rule is dangerous even though its do- 
minion extends only over one's personal being. 
Having controlled the despotism of the senses in 
■childhood and the passions and loves of youth, 
volition now was "free as the sun" and often acted 
arbitrarily. 

There is, of course, a certain amount of arbitrari- 
ness in all human natures, as Wordsworth was well 
aware. He illustrates the presence of this principle 
in children in the poem, "Anecdote for Fathers." 
When the five-year-old child in the poem is pressed 



46 WORDSWORTH 

for a reason why he would rather be at Kilve than 
at Liswynfarm, he suddenly catches sight of a 
weather-cock, and in order to evade further ques- 
tioning he arbitrarily answers : 

At Kilve there was no weather-cock; 
And that's the reason why. 

This principle of arbitrariness is again illustrated 
in a sonnet the incident of which was drawn from 
Wordsworth's own experience. He once stood by 
a harbor that was sprinkled with ships far and nigh. 
But suddenly, and with no explainable reason, he 
fixed his eye upon one goodly vessel : 

This Ship was naught to me, nor I to her. 
Yet I pursued her with a Lover's look ; 
This Ship to all the rest did I prefer. 

He not only preferred to single out a particular 
ship with the eye, which in itself were a trivial 
matter, but in weightier affairs, he showed decided 
preferences rather arbitrarily. His choice of books, 
his judgment of contemporary authors, his selection 
of subject matter for poetry, his preference for 
certain regions of thought — all bear more or less 
the marks of arbitrary choice. Though not always, 
he often followed the line of least resistance. But 
when once the direction was chosen, he followed it 
resolutely and persistently to the end. His volition 
focused his feelings and imagination on single ob- 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 47 

jects of perception and thought until those objects 
became vivid realities to him and gave up, as he 
felt, their secret meaning. 

Now, from the extraordinary frequency with 
which allusions are made to his childhood in 
Wordsworth's poetry, it may be suspected that he 
chose somewhat arbitrarily to vivify in his later life 
the memories of that childhood. We are strength- 
ened in our suspicion when we consider with what 
interest, or rather with what lack of interest, he 
regarded the period of his life between childhood 
and maturity. To be sure in the Books from the 
Third to the Sixth, inclusive, of the Prelude, in 
which poem he deliberately sets out to trace thej 
growth of a poetic mind from childhood to maturity, 
•there is considerable said about adolescence and 
maturing youth. But even here, especially in the 
Fourth and Fifth Books, he has a tendency often 
to slip back into the period of "our simple child- 
hood," which "sits upon a throne that hath more 
power than all the elements." Again and again 
he returns to this point of view. Even in the 
Eighth Book, where according to the natural evolu- 
tion of the poem he should have passed this period, 
he not only gives a long retrospective view of that 
time when nature was "prized for her own sake" 
and became his joy, but he describes the qualities 



48 WORDSWORTH 

of childhood fancies at great length. In the Twelfth 
and Thirteenth Books, where one wonld think 
surely he had done with the subject, he turns upon 
it more strongly than ever in his attempt to explain 
the mystery of imagination and taste. He exclaims : 

Oh ! mystery of man, from w hat a depth 
Proceed thy honors ! I am lost, but see 
In simple childhood something of the base 
On which thy greatness stands. 

In fact, with the exception of the Seventh Book, 
which describes his residence in London and which 
is perhaps the dullest book in the Prelude, and 
the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Books, into which 
political considerations enter, the Prelude con- 
tinually eddies about the idea of childhood and 
never really passes beyond it. 

Outside of his inner communings with himself 
and nature which he had begun in his childhood, 
Wordsworth has little to say about his college life 
and vacations that is instructive and inspiring. As 
if by a preconception that this life can be made up 
of nothing but superficialities and conventions, he 
seems resohitely to have set his mind against it. 
We grant that at Cambridge in Wordsworth's time 
and at all colleges in his time and in our time, too, 
there is a vast deal of life that never goes below 
the surface of things — shallow, mechanical, super- 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 49 

ficial, conventional, well-nigh dead. But we see, too, 
that beneath this show of things, deep in the heart 
of many an adolescent and growing youth there is 
sincerity, freshness, vitality, genius — which qualities 
this same college, or these same colleges, will help 
to unfold and develop, if the youth but give them 
a chance. And what revelations could a Words- 
worth have made had he given himself to study 
sympathetically some of these same growing and 
unfolding youths — youths as interesting, one would 
think, as Westmoreland dalesmen ! But Worth- 
worth chose positively not to do this. To state 
it more charitably, his austere and unbending nature 
did not permit him to do it. Still more charitably, 
he actually made efforts to do it ; but as he could 
not do it sympathetically, his efforts were futile. 
Of himself in those days he says : 

My mind was at that time 
A parti-coloured show of grave and gay. 
Solid and light, shortsighted and profound ; 
Of inconsiderate habits and sedate,' 
Consorting in one mansion unreproved. 

Of course, the gay, the light, the shortsightedness, 
the inconsiderate habits, were the result of his 
contact with the sort of society that he considered 
contaminating. Its repellent force on him was 
sufficiently strong to prevent him from penetrating 

4 



50 WORDSWORTH 

through it to the deeper life that lay hidden there. 
It may be noted incidentally that Wordsworth 
observed a duality existing in his nature at this 
' time ; but the gay and light self was so feeble in 
him that it soon dwindled away and died a natural 
death. This death, however, could not have taken 
place had Wordsworth not been far less interested 
in his college experiences than in the experiences 
of his childhood. He says somewhat indifferently: 

Not seeking those who might participate 
My deeper pleasures, .... easily I passed 
From the remembrance of better things, 
And slipped into ordinary works 

Of careless youth, unburthened, and unalarmed 

Companionships, 

Friendships, acquaintances, were welcome all. 
We sauntered, played, or rioted ; we talked 
Unprofitable talk at morning hours ; 
Drifted about along the streets and walks, 
Read lazily in trivial books, went forth 
To gallop through the country in blind zeal 
Of senseless horsemanship, or on the breast 
Of Cam sailed boisterously, and let the stars 
Come forth perhaps without one quiet thought. 

It is highly instructive to contrast this allusion to 
sailing boisterously "on the breast of Cam" and 
letting the "stars come forth perhaps without one 
quiet thought," with the description in the First 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 51 

Book of the Prelude of sailing in an "elfin pinnace," 
which boat moved on, 

Leaving behind her still, on either side, 

Small circles glittering idly in the moon, 

Until they mettled all into one track 

Of sparkling light. 

It was not only the boisterous sailing on the breast 
of Cam, but the companionships, the unprofitable 
talk, the reading of trivial books, the senseless- 
horsemanship — these all were matters of indiffer- 
ence to him ; and the fact that they were so, 
produced a sort of a gap in the otherwise con- 
tinuousness of his life. A link between his child- 
hood and manhood was lost, which void gave rise 
to a sense of double consciousness, a consciousness 
of himself and some other Being: 

So wide appears 
The vacancy between me and those days 
Which yet have such self-presence in my mind 
That, musing on them, often do I seem 
Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself 
And of some other Being. 

There is an important psychological observation 
underlying this passage. The claim for Words- 
worth that he is a philosopher has often been 
challenged, but it has never been disputed that 
he is the keenest of psychologists. One of the 
professed purposes of his work was to trace "the 



52 WORDSWORTH 

primary laws of our nature, chiefly, as far as regards 
the manner in which we associate ideas in a state 
of excitement." He was both an experimental and 
an introspective psychologist. Although antedating 
modern science and modern scientific methods, he 
put such a series of questions to children and 
peasants about their reasons for things that would 
do justice to a modern psychological questionairee : 

When I began to enquire. 

To watch and question those I met and speak 

Without reserve to them, the lonely roads 

Were open schools in which I daily read, 

With most delight the passions of mankind, 

Whether by words, looks, sighs, or tears, revealed ; 

There saw into the depth of human souls. 

Souls that appeared to have no depth at all 

To careless eyes. 

Wordsworth was introspective also, and when he 
writes such an introspective passage as the second 
above, we must look carefully into its psychological 
import. It is a simple fact of psychology that when 
any memory images are recalled and brooded over 
they become more vivid and lifelike than ordinary 
memory images, and can be made as vivid and life- 
like as the images of immediate perception. Our 
theory thus far has been that Wordsworth, 
following somewhat the line of least resistance, 
deliberatelv and arbitrarilv vivified the "remem- 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 53 

brance of those long past hours" of childhood at 
llie expense of the memories of adolescent years; 
and that, as a consequence, the aggregate memories 
of childhood stood in his mind somewhat apart; 
from his ideas and images of immediate perception, 
so that he simultaneously felt conscious of himself 
and some other Being. 

There is a curious affirmation of our theory in 
a passage near the close of the Third Book of the 
Prelude. After recounting a tournament of blows, 
"feuds, factions, flatteries, enmity, guile, murmur- 
ing, submission, bold government," and sundry 
other uninteresting matters relating to college life, 
Wordsworth says : 

Of these and other kindred notices 

I cannot say what portion is in truth 

The naked recollection of that time, 

And what may rather have been called to life 

By after meditation. 

This is an affirmation of our theory because one 
can conceive of Wordsworth admitting the possi- 
bility of mistake in such a judgment only in case 
of a profound indifference to the subject in hand ; 
it is a curious affirmation because there is not a 
single admission of doubt anywhere in the Prelude 
with regard to his childhood memories. The 
intensitv with which Wordsworth brooded over his 



54 IVORDSJVORTH 

childhood experience canceled all doubt that per- 
haps some of the memories of them might have 
been "called to life by after meditation." 

The fact, however, that Wordsworth arbitrarily 
vivified the memories of childhood is not a fact of 
sufficient weight to account fully for this strangely 
divided consciousness. There is a deeper cause for 
it. There was another force that wrought in con- 
junction with his will toward the same end. That 
force was the great external fact of Wordsworth's 
late youth and early manhood, the fact, namely, of 
the French Revolution. During his adolescent 
years and up to the dawn of his vital interest in 
the Revolution, he was much given to introspective 
tendencies. In the parts of the Prelude relating to 
this period of time, are many passages that speak 
of the "reasonings of the mind turned inward." 
It was his wont to separate himself from his 
companions and allow his "mind to turn into her- 
self." He early discovered that 

Caverns there are within my mind which sun 
Could never penetrate. 

But in early days of youth this tendency towards 
introspection may easily become abnormal, and 
there is a slight touch of the morbid and the hectic 
in some of Wordsworth's youthful moodiness. 
There existed in his mind, he says, at this time, 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 5o 

A treasonable growth 

Of indecisive judgments, that impaired 

And shook the mind's simplicity. 

He slightly overstrained the instrument of intro- 
spection that was to do such effective work in later 
years. This excess, however, can easily be over- 
looked in the light of the fact that he now also 
perfected this instrument for future use. 

But when, in his twenty-second year, Words- 

/ worth became vitally alive to the agitation, the 

sorrow, and the terror of the Revolution, he was 

completely, though slowly, taken out of himself. 

His mind turned from within, outward : 

I gradually withdrew 

Into a noisier world, and thus ere long 
Became a patriot ; and my heart was all 
Given to the people, and my love was theirs. 

And when later he was at the point of leaving 

France, he assures us that he would 
At this time with willing heart 
Have undertaken for a cause so great 
Service however dangerous. 

And the only reason why he did not perform this 
"service however dangerous" was that he was pre- 
emptorily called home by his guardians. His sum- 
mons home, however, did not lessen his enthusiasm 
for the cause of the Revolution but rather 
heightened it. It is a common experience that a 



56 WORDSWORTH 

man's enthusiasm for a cause is heightened when 
his hands are tied so that he cannot play the part 
in it he has espoused in his heart. Wordsworth 
had been at Orleans and had learned the local and 
national characteristics of the French. He had been 
at Blois and for three months had associated inti- 
mately with Beaupuy, who opened his mind to 
the real issues of the Revolution. He had seen the 
hunger-bitten girl and the heifer, which incident 
greatly enforced the arguments of Beaupuy that 
a benignant spirit was abroad to destroy such 
poverty; and Wordsworth's deepest chords of sym- 
pathy were touched. He had accepted the Septem- 
ber Massacre as a necessary violence during a 
revolution, for, as he explained a little later, "n 
time of revolution is not a season of true liberty." 
He had been in Paris and had "passed the prison 
where the unhappy Monarch lay," and that night 
in a high and lonely room he had felt most deeply 
in what world he was, what ground he trod on, 
what air he breathed. He thought of the September 
]\lassacre and of the Monarch in the prison, and 
conjured up similar scenes from "tragic fictions or 
true history." "And in this way," he says. 

I wrought upon myself 
Until I seemed to hear the voice that cried 
To the whole city, "Sleep no more." 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD b7 

He had already clearly perceived that the forces 
at work in the Revolution did not arise in a day 
and were not the harvest of "popular government 
and equality," but he clearly saw 

That neither these nor aught 
Of wild belief engrafted on their names 
By false philosophy had caused the woe, 
But a terrific reservoir of guilt 
And ignorance filled up from age to age 
That could no longer hold its loathsome charge, 
But burst and spread in deluge through the land. 

What he did not perceive as clearly at this time 
was that it would take as many ages for the 
reservoir of guilt and ignorance to disappear as 
it had been in filling up from age to age. He had, 
on the contrary, looked for the immediate appear- 
ance of a new and glorious era of liberty. 

He had also revolved in his mind "how much 
the destiny of man had still hung upon single 
persons," and if perchance he himself were destined 
by providence to lead the people through the 
])resent crisis, he would not thwart the designs of 
providence, but would be ready for the sacrifice. 
Reluctantly indeed, then, did he obey the summons 
that called him back to England. When once at 
home, he was unable to act, but was given much 
time to meditate. Then it was that the full power 
and the spirit of the Revolution reverberated 



S8 WORDSWORTH 

through his whole sensitive nature. His senses and 
feelings and moral being were as alive to the issues 
of the Revolution as they had ever been to the 
forces of nature. He was filled with the highest 
hopes and the most sanguine aspirations ; but these 
hopes and aspirations were soon doomed to dis- 
appointment. It was only a few months after this 
that England declared war against the French 
Revolutionists, and Wordsworth's moral nature 
was given its first great shock : 

No shock 

Given to my moral nature had I known 
Down to that very moment; neither lapse 
Nor turn of sentiment that might be named 
A revolution, save at this one time ; 
All else was progress on the self-same path ' 

, On which with a diversity of pace 

I had been travelling; this a stride at once 
Into another region. 

But the stride was not as swift as one would 
surmise from this passage. Wordsworth's affections 
'for his native country and his native soil were of 
slow growth and were deeply rooted. And slowly 
and painfully his alienation wrought itself into his 
character. 

But a second shock was awaiting him. It came 
when the French Revolutionists took aggressive 
steps in subduing the efforts made for liberty in 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 59 

Switzerland. France herself was abandoning the 
cause of human liberty, and Wordsworth's sym- 
pathies were alienated : 

Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defence 
For one of conquest, losing sight of all 
Which they had struggled for. 

Cut ofT from sympathy with his own coimtry and 
with the country whose cause he had espoused, he 
was thrown back into himself more violently and 
more completely than he had been taken out of 
himself. For a number of years his depression was 
as great as his hopes and aspirations had been high. 
Were all his aspirations for the relief of suffering 
humanity vain and foolish? Were there no grounds 
at all for the confidence he placed in human good? 
Was he, then, utterly wrong in his social and 
political ideals, and was life after all nothing but 
an empty mockery? These questions demanded 
answers. For Wordsworth there was just one 
method of finding answers to them and of escaping 
from his depression, the method, namely, of asso- 
ciating with the simple life and society of his early 
surroundings. Unfortunately this method was 
remote from his thoughts at first and he attempted 
another way of escape. He tried to find solace 
for his tempest-tossed soul in the speculative 
philosophies of his day : 



6o WORDSWORTH 

This was the time, when, all things tending fast 
To depravation, speculative schemes — 
That promised to abstract the hopes of Man 
Out of his feelings, to be fixed thenceforth 
Forever in a purer element — 
Found ready welcome. 

But in that speculative scheming which promised' 
to abstract the hopes of Man out of his feelings- 
Wordsworth was wholly outside of his natural 
sphere. Perhaps none of the world's great geniuses 
have been more helpless than Wordsworth in mere 
abstract speculation. Here he was not only "out 
of the pale of love," his sentiment "soured and 
corrupted, upwards to the source,"' but he was 
really doing violence to his nature, his affections 
and his powers. And the result of this prolonged 
experience was that he lost 

All feeling of conviction, and, in fine. 
Sick, wearied out with contrarities. 
Yielded up moral questions in despair. 

This was the "soul's last and lowest ebb," and 
he turned for a time to the study of abstract 
science with the faint hope that his mind might 
be drawn away from the dark moral questions that 
had haunted it. 

But now he had come to live with his sister. 
and her association, together with the surroundings 
of simple life and nature, began to be a healing 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 6l 

"balm to the wounds of his mind, and gradually, 
as by inches, he recovered from his depression. 
As the process went on, memories of his early 
childhood joys, sweet and strong, came trooping 
into his mind. Associations with familiar haunts 
of childhood vividly recalled many memories that 
had been these years slumbering but half con- 
sciously in his mind. In the presence of these new 
joys of childhood memories, the immediate past 
became almost as a blank to him. His voluntary 
indifference to his college experiences and the tragic 
reaction of his interest in the Revolution, that is, 
the character of the man and the spirit of the times, 
wrought together to cut his life, as it were, in 
twain, and the days of his childhood stood out in 
bold relief from the rest of his life. They were 
now the only memories of the past that he could 
associate with all that he held most dear. Separated 
from him in point of time, they stood in his mind 
as an aggregate whole distinctly apart from his 
ideas and images of immediate perception. "So 
wide appears the vacancy between me and those 
days," it will be remembered the passage runs, that 
"often do I seem two consciousnesses, conscious 
-of myself and of some other Being." What a unique 
:and interested bit of psychology is this when viewed 
in the right perspective ! 



62 WORDSWORTH 

Since these childhood memories were the most 
sacred things of the past to him he would cling to 
them as to life, and with that frugality of mind 
which loses no opportunities, he would turn them, 
to the best account. So he cherished them and 
nurtured them all back to life, and they became 
to him a living and vital reality. It is not to> 
be wondered at, then, as he came back into the 
same surroundings and atmosphere in which he 
had spent his passionate life of childhood, and heard 
the same sounds and saw the same sights over 
again that he had seen and heard in those early 
days, that he would make one of his characters in 
a poem say : 

My eyes are dim with childish tears, 

My heart is idly stirred, 

For the same sound is in my ears 

Which in those days I heard ; — 

nor that in many another poem written soon after 
his recovery from the depression of the Revolution 
his mind would constantly slip back to the time 
of childhood, which he now believed held the key 
to the secret of the profoundest meanings of life : 

Our childhood sits, 
Our simple childhood, sits upon a throne 
That hath more power than all the elements, 
I guess not what this tells of Being past. 
Nor what it augurs of the life to come ; — 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 6>y 

nor that, finally, in the Twelfth Book of the Prelude^ 
after having finished the story of his despondency 
following the Revolution in the Eleventh, he would 
luxuriate, nay, fairly revel, in the beauties and 
powers wrapped up in the potencies of childhood 
with such passages of strength and intensity as the 
following : 

I roamed from hill to hill, from rock to rock, 
Still craving combinations of new forms, 
New pleasure, wider empire for the sight. 
Proud of her own endowments, and rejoiced 
To lay the inner faculties asleep. 

Before I was called forth 
From the retirement of my native hills, 
I loved whate'er I saw ; nor lightly loved, 
But most intensely; never dreamt of aught 
More grand, more fair, more exquisitely framed 
Than those few nooks to which my happy feet 
Were limited. I had not at that time 
Lived long enough, nor in the least survived 
The first diviner influence of this world. 
As it appears to unaccustomed eyes. 

I roamed, in daily presence of this scene 

Upon the naked pool and dreary crags. 

And on the melancholy beacon, fell 

A spirit of pleasure and youth's golden gleam ; 

And think ye not with radiance more sublime 

For these remembrances, and for the power 

They have left behind? So feeling comes in aid- 



64 WORDSWORTH 

Of feeling, and diversity of strength 
Attends us, if but once we have been strong. 
Oh ! mystery of man, from what a depth 
Proceed thy honors ! I am lost, but see 
In simple childhood something of the base 
On which thy greatness stands. 

And although these and like passages are not to 
be wondered at when viewed in the light of their 
■development, they are also not to be accepted un- 
critically as having universal validity and as giving 
a normal perspective of the truth of life. They 
are rather to be regarded as exaggerated and highly 
individualized experiences, with a certain amount 
of truth and validity underlying them. 

And now, that we have, in the light of the 
enfoldment of Wordsworth's character and the 
Revolutionary times through which he had just 
passed, traced the development of his interest in 
childhood memories and have seen how it happened 
that he came to prize them so highly, it will be 
our next task to consider what particular meaning 
and validity they had for Wordsworth, and what 
imiversal meaning and validity they may have 
permanently. 



CHAPTER III 

MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD: THEIR 
ETHICAL MEANING. 

Since Wordsworth's life of childhood was almost 
wholly a life of passionate love for natural objects, 
his return to the memories of his childhood was 
simultaneous with his returning interest in nature. 
Hence these two experiences of his are inextricably 
bound up with each other, and we only speak of 
them separately for the purpose of exposition. In 
his essay on Wordsworth's Ethics, Leslie Stephen 
says, "The great problem of life, that is, as he 
conceives it, is to secure continuity between the 
period at which we are guided by half-conscious 
instincts, and that in which man is able to supply 
the place of those primitive impulses by reasoned 
conviction. This is the thought which comes over 
I and over again in his deepest poems and round 
which all his teachings center," It would perhaps 
be more accurate to say that a great many poems 

6 



66 WORDSWORTH 

written round and about the time of the composition 
of the Prelude, touch upon this idea ; that in the 
Hght of the enfoldment of Wordsworth's character 
and the revolutionary times through which he had 
just passed, it was peculiarily necessary for him to 
attempt a unity of the two ends of his life that had 
been almost broken asunder ; and that, instead of 
attempting to find a continuity between the instincts 
of childhood and the reason of man as such, 
Wordsworth, who had just been thoroughly con- 
vinced of the absolute hollowness of rationalism 
and of all abstract speculation, was really attempt- 
ing either to transcend reason or to level it down 
to the basis of childhood experiences themselves. 
Wordsworth was now wholly on the side of the 
intuitionists, and he would give no quarters to the 
rationalists. He carried the revolutionary method 
and spirit with him. Though he may have become 
a "lost leader" from the political point of view, he 
had no intentions of giving up revolutionary leader- 
ship in other fields. He fell back upon his personal 
experiences as a basis for operation. Since the 
experiences of his childhood were the only ones 
that had not played him false, he believed in their 
validity ; and he would dare to make the most 
of them. 

And here he comes into harmony with the 



MEAf OKIES Of CHILDHOOD 67 

movement in English Literature called the Roman- 
tic movement. As has often been said, the Romantic 
movement can be defined only in negative terms. 
If there was one quality, however, that all the 
leaders of the movement possessed, it was the 
insistence on the expression of personal liberty and 
personal experience. These experiences were as 
varied as the individuals engaged in the movement, 
and, therefore, the movement has no other im- 
portant quality common to all its leaders. But 
this spirit of insistence on the expression of per- 
sonal experience gave Wordsworth the courage of 
his convictions ; and would it not have been so, 
perhaps those strange and beautiful raptures of his 
childhood would have never been brought to light. 
It must not be supposed, however, that he was 
acting with a conscious gusto in the matter. He 
was being deeply and vitally moved by the spirit 
of his times, and his conscious will wrought in 
harmony with that spirit; and he was in dead 
earnest. The robe of the prophet had now fallen 
upon him. He had become a mystic and a seer. 
He had already come into possession of his poetical 
powers. He was now formulating his poetic prin- 
ciples both in prose and in verse. He had said 
that the poet, like the prophet, has "a sense that 
fits him to perceive objects unseen before." His 



68 WORDSWORTH 

mind ranged down the scale of thought to the 
instincts and impulses of childhood ; it ranged up 
the scale through reasoning to a transcendent 
region of experience. And these two remote ends; 
of experience, he felt, met in a harmony of truth 
in one's immediate experience of memory, or recol- 
lection. And so the memories of childhood, which 
had been rejected by the builders, became one of 
the foundation stones in his experiment of life. 

These memories of childhood, then, were for 
Wordsworth no mere poetic fancies or figments 
of the imagination, but they stood in his mind as 
a great reality. And, first of all, they were 
an ethical reality, since they were for him the 
source of joy, tranquility, and intimations of im- 
mortality. In late years once, it is true, in a very 
scientific and unpoetic frame of mind, Wordsworth 
declared that in his childhood he was of a "stiff, 
moody, violent temper." No doubt this is scien- 
tifically and unpoetically accurate. But according 
to his theory now, there was beneath this moody 
and unbending self, another and deeper self in the 
child, not tainted with original sin, but invested 
with glorious and heavenly attributes; and the 
experiences of this deeper self of the child furnished 
the material for the will and memory to act upon. 
It cannot be stated too early that one of the 



I 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 69 

characteristics of the mystic is that he insists on 
the validity of immediate experience. Wordsworth, 
it will be remembered, said that an early emotion 
may be contemplated in tranquility, "till, by a species 
of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and 
an emotion, kindred to that which was before the 
subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and 
does itself actually exist in the mind." His will, 
focusing his feelings upon some past experience, 
produces an emotion that does actually exist in the 
mind and has immediate validity. In this sense, 
a memory image or an imaginative picture is as 
valuable to the mind as an actual perceptive image. 
This is characteristic of much of Wordsworth's 
experience. Witness one of many examples that 
might l^e given : 

That very day, 
From a bare ridge we also first beheld 
Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved 
To have a soulless image on the eye 
That had usurped upon a living thought 
That never more could be. 

The "living thought" of imagination is to be valued 
more than the "soulless image" of perception. The 
important point to seize is that a mental image is 
to be valued for its own sake. So, upon the most 
sacred experiences of his past, Wordsworth long 



70 WORDSWORTH 

and earnestly focused his feelings and imaginative 
thought until, around these experiences as a center, 
there irradiated a dome of light which he called 
the golden age, heaven, immortality. These 
glorified present memory experiences which had 
their concrete basis in childhood was what Words- 
worth prized. They brought him joy and tran- 
quility and intimations of immortality. 

Immortality is at best a vague and shadowy 
thing for us here below. We can never do more 
than speculate about it on this side of the grave. 
We can only have intimations of it. We can see 
it only, so to speak, through a key hole ; and there 
are many key holes ; and it mattters little which 
we choose. Naturally we choose that which appeals 
most to our experiences. Wordsworth chose the 
key hole of his childhood experiences. Long and 
earnestly he peered through it into the shadowy 
and invisible world. Often he thought "of Eternity, 
of first, and last, and midst, and without end," and 
of "life, death, eternity! momentous themes;" and 
he could not guess what our childhood, our simple 
childhood "tells of Being past, nor what it augurs 
of the life to come." Joy, tranquility, intimations 
of immortality — these are substantial results in the 
experiment of life. And since our childhood, which 
"sits upon a throne that hath more power than all 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 71 

the elements," is the substantial basis upon which 
they rest, the memories of childhood have absolute 
validity in Wordsworth's scheme of life. 

To the question as to the ultimate ethical 
meaning and validity of Wordsworth's theory of 
childhood memories, our answers are various. 
Because of the very nature of the question, personal 
experiences and temperamental dififerences enter 
into the opinions of those who judge. Perhaps the 
only point upon which there can be a real consensus 
of opinion is that a number of passages, as, for 
example, those quoted in the preceding chapter, 
taken singly cannot be accepted at their face value. 
The}^ must be considered as polemical and exag- 
gerated statements of a well enough defined prin- 
ciple that underlies them. The reason for these 
exaggerations lies in Wordsworth's revolutionary 
zeal in opposing abstract speculation and logical 
reason, in his vigorous defence of a doctrine 
opposed to cold-hearted science, that "false 
secondary power by which we multiply distinc- 
tions." Not that he was opposed to scientific facts 
as facts. No one was a closer and more careful 
observer of the habits and conduct of animals, 
children, and human beings. But the whole energy 
of his mind was leveled against dry scientific and 
speculative systems ; and in his fervor to state his 



•72 WORDSWORTH 

own positive convictions, he fell into making 
exaggerated statements. Incident to these exag- 
gerations, there is sometimes a lack of clearness 
to distinguish between childhood experiences and 
the memories of those experiences. When cleared 
of its exaggerations and its ambiguity, the doctrine 
is essentially a doctrine of recollection, which 
resolves itself really into the simplicity of a 
psychological method rather than the dignity of 
a philosophical system. The child is not really 
the philosopher in esse but is the philosopher 
in posse. He possesses fresh and divine potencies 
which, if conserved and transmuted, will constitute 
the solid substance in the experience of the 
philosopher that is to be. 

Reduced, then, to its normal proportions, what 
is the ultimate meaning and validity of this 
doctrine? Here it is that the widest difiference of 
critical opinion prevails, and perhaps will always 
continue to prevail, due mainly to personal 
experience and temperamental preferences. It all 
depends upon the point of view. To the hard- 
headed reasoner there is little in this doctrine that 
commends itself. He will insist that it must be 
submitted to the arbitrament of scientific fact. It 
is certain that in childhood there is a great deal 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 73 

of impotence. The perceptive faculties are not 
trained. The imagination is crude. Thought is 
embryonic. To be sure, in childhood there is 
innocency and sweetness. But it is the innocency/ 
of ignorance and the sweetness of inexperience. 
Besides, in some types of childhood, at least, there 
is plenty of anger, spiteful jealousies, wrangling, 
screaming, and getting red in the face. And it is 
precisely the memory of these sharp and thorny 
experiences that rankle in the mind in after years. 
True indeed is all this, Wordsworth would reply. 
He himself had visitings of those moodier hours. 
He had experienced all the manifest weaknesses of 
childhood. He would not write himself down as a 
polished and philosophical little scholar. He would 
not put a false veneer on the facts. They are 
written large in the Prelude, so that he who runs 
may read. But deeper and more vital facts than 
these Wordsworth also found in his childhood. 
His childhood, at bottom, he discovered was a 
wonderful compact of instincts and impulses that 
defied all analysis. There were gleams of light at 
opportune times. There were occasional flashes 
of insight into the life of things. His soul, like 
every other serious soul, had known its god-like 
hours : 



74 WORDSWORTH 

There's not a man 
That lives who hath not known his god-like hours, 
And feels not what an empire we inherit, 
As natural beings in the strength of Nature. 

It does not require the occult wisdom of a 
philosopher to distinguish broadly between these 
higher moments of inspiration and the lower moods 
of sullenness. It lies within the power of every 
individual's will and memory to recreate the exalted 
moments of life until they are lived over again in 
the mind. This, then, may become a universal 
method of life and a panacea for its ills. 

There is, however, a still more serious objection 
to be made from the standpoint of scientific fact. 
Our perspective of childhood naturally tends to 
become untrue. There is a natural inclination in 
us to give additional colors to the joys and 
pleasures of the past. In his zeal to revive his 
memories of childhood experiences Wordsworth 
did not guard against the possible deception that 
some of them might have been "called to life by 
after meditation." And, therefore, he unconsciouslv 
drifted into an attitude towards his childhood 
experiences that is essentially unscientific and 
seems to be based on prejudice. To a disinterested 
person this natural inclination of the mind can 
easily be illustrated from experience. I remember 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 75 

the schoolhonse in which I attended school as a 
child. It was the largest schoolhouse in the 
neighborhood. To me it seemed spacious indeed. 
I always carried an idea of its spaciousness with 
me. Some years after I had left the schoolhouse 
I came back to it. Then it appeared to me not 
spacious, but small, dingy, and stufify. My memory 
image that I had carried with me these years was 
shattered. Most of our early memory images, if 
they could be tested likewise, would be shattered. 
From the scientific standpoint, then, Wordsworth 
seems to take a prejudiced position, for he 
deliberately chose not to have his memory images 
shattered. But he would not, of course, defend 
this position from the standpoint of prejudice; he 
would defend it from the standpoint of subjective 
experience. He would not have the vision from 
within invaded and outdone by the outward facts 
of life: 

We have a vision of our own 

Oh! why should we undo it? 

The immediate psychic entity in the form of a 
memory image was to him as valuable as the 
original experience from which that memory image 
took its rise. Though showing a reverent attitude 
toward the outward and verifiable facts of science, 
he showed a greater reverence for the immediate 



76 WORDSWORTH 

facts of consciousness. Whether an imaginative 
picture, or a memory image, or a transfused or 
interfused presence, the inner fact of consciousness, 
held priority of validity in his mind. And at this- 
point, Wordsworth, the mystic, parts company with 
those who insist on objective standards of scientific 
accuracy to decide what is true reality. And it is. 
exactly on these grounds of difference that critics. 
are divided as to the ultimate value of Words- 
worth's theory of childhood memories. 

This same divergence, based on two widely 
different methods of approaching the problems of 
life, is manifested in the criticism that has been 
written on the famous "Ode on Intimations of 
Immortality." The conclusion, it may be argued, 
that there is a future life is based on the hypotheses 
of a pre-existent life. The hypothesis of a pre- 
existent life is based on the hypothesis that heaven 
lies about us in our infancy, which latter hypothesis,. 
being the major premise, ought to be an uncontro- 
vertible fact — a thing which most of us are quite 
unwilling to admit. Wordsworth reasons in a circle 
and there is no logical foundation for his thought. 
So says the man of logical thought and of scientific 
accuracy. On the other hand, it may be argued 
that in the immortal life which is a new state of 
existence, there may be a complete transcendence- 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 77 

of our known order of time. Accordingly, then, 
in eternity there is no such thing as time. Before 
and after, past and present, are terms not in the 
vocabulary of angels and the immortals. This idea 
is presented more clearly in a passage in the Four- 
teenth Book of the Prelude. One night after a 
glorious vision from the top of a mountain in 
which Wordsworth says — 

The Moon hung naked in a firmament 
Of azure without cloud, and at my feet 
Rested a silent sea of hoary mist — 

after this vision had partially dissolved into air, it 
appeared to him the "type of a majestic intellect": 

There I beheld the emblem of a mind 
That feeds upon infinity, that broods 
Over the dark abyss, intent to hear 
Its voices issuing forth to silent light 
In one continuous stream. 

And like unto this majestic intellect that feeds upon 
infinity and that broods over the dark abyss, are 
the higher minds of human beings when inspired, 
which minds live in a world of life. 

By sensible impressions not enthralled. 

But by their quickening impulse made more prompt 

To hold fit converse with the spiritual world, 

And with the generations of mankind 

Spread over time, past, present, and to come. 

Age after age till Time shall be no more. 



JVORDSIVORTH 



Just as time — past, present, and to come — is nothing 
to the inspired mind that can hold fit converse 
with the spiritual world, so our known order of 
time seems to be transcended in the Ode in which 
Wordsworth reached his highest point of inspira- 
tion. We have here, then, practically nothing to 
do with pre-existence and future life as such — it 
is simply one ever-present eternal state. And why 
should not the stray gleams of the pure white light 
of childhood intimate to us, as strongly as does 
any other phase of our experience, the life 
immortal ? 

Or, waiving the point of actual transcendence 
of time and granting that the poem is of a 
sufficiently earthly mold to have remained within 
the regular mundane order of time, we can still 
maintain from the intuitionist's or mystical stand- 
point that Wordsworth's grounds are perfectly 
tenable. The fulcrum, so to speak, upon which the 
mind turns from pre-existence to the future life, 
is not the objective experience represented in the 
child, but the subjective immediate memory ex- 
perience of the poet. From the standpoints of 
tone, feeling, motive, and meaning of the poem 
as a whole, the passage, 

O joy! that in our embers 
Is something that doth live — 



ng 1! 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 7»> 

is much more nearly at the core of it than the 

passage, 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. 

In after years Wordsworth explained to his readers 
that he had used the theory of pre-existence merely 
as a device, making the best of it that he could 
as a poet. Some have said the explanation was 
due to the weakness of old age ; it would be more 
fair perhaps to say that it was due to the sanity 
of old age. Leslie Stephen says Wordsworth took 
unnecessary pains in making the explanation. It 
may be so, but judging from the extraordinary 
proneness of human beings to clutch at something 
outward and objective, something away from them- 
selves, as a basis for reasoning and faith, Words- 
worth's admonition is not at all superfluous. He 
publicly said of the theory that "it is far too 
shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith, as 
more than an element in our instincts of immor- 
tality." But in spite of his disclaiming all rights 
to the theory, critics have again and again foisted 
it upon him as though there were something 
distinctly Wordsworthian in it. 

In short, Wordsworth's theory of childhood 
memories has constantly been discussed as though 
the question of origin were the prime question 
to decide. Undoubtedly the whole trend of modern 



8c WORDSWORTH 

thought on the question of origin is to explain the 
marvellous illuminations that come to children as 
the reverberations of past life in its physical and 
psychical evolution. A modern scientist, Dr. G. 
Stanley Hall, who of all living men has perhaps col- 
lected the largest number of facts concerning child- 
hood and adolescence, speaks like a poet, yet with 
the authority of science, when he says, "Whatever 
soul-stufif may or may not be, it is most susceptible 
and responsive to all present influences, and also, 
in a yet far deeper sense, most pervaded with 
reverberations from an innumerable past." And 
again, "We are influenced in our deeper, more 
temperamental dispositions by the life-habits and 
code of conduct of we know not what innumerable 
hosts of ancestors, which like a cloud of witnesses 
are present through our lives ; and our souls are 
echo chambers in which their whispers reverberate." 
No doubt, the pre-existent theory must gradually 
give way to the more scientific theory. Nor does 
this latter theory in any way degrade the value and 
meaning of childhood memories. For the theory 
in question is influenced by a second trend of 
modern thought, the trend, namely, to distinguish 
sharply between two kinds of judgments — existen- 
tial and spiritual. The first is a judgment of origin, 
the second a judgment of value. Since these two 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 8i 

judgments are independent of each other, the vakie 
of a thing cannot be determined by its origin, 
whether that origin be lowly or high. Whether the 
child is a product of a long physical and psychical 
evolutionary process, or whether its soul comes 
directly from a state of spiritual pre-existence, its 
present spiritual experience has precisely the same 
\alue. "By their fruits ye shall know them, not 
by their roots." And with this latter conception 
\\'ordsworth was thoroughly in harmony. What- 
ever we may believe about the origin of child life, 
and whatever Wordsworth may have believed about 
it. it was "from a sense of the indomitableness of 
the spirit" that was in him as a child, and much 
more from the sense of the volitional and 
indomitable spirit in him as a man, which he felt 
would not and could not die, that gives genumeness 
and permanent vitality to the Ode. The fame of 
the Ode cannot rest on any question of origin. 

Although W^ordsworth was intellectually curious 
enough to wnsh to know the origin of life, yet his 
chief interest centered in the operations of his will 
and ir.emory upon his childhood experiences, for 
the purpose of producing an immediate illumination 
in his mind. And, in the moment of inspiration, 
he joined the memories of instinctive and impulsive 
childhood with an experience that transcended 



82 WORDSWORTH 

reason and time. But this new experience defies 
any sensible and rational explanation, says the man 
of a scientific temper of mind. Be it so ; and since 
it must be so, men of this temper of mind will 
always find in Wordsworth a rock of offense after 
a certain point has been reached. They will find a 
permanent satisfaction in Jeffries's and Macaulay's 
commonsense way of dealing with Wordsworth. 
On the other hand, men whose temperaments are 
like that of Wordsworth's, will always rate Words- 
worth and his doctrine of childhood memories 
extremely high. The intensity with which he 
focused his mind upon his childhood experiences, 
and the still greater intensity with which he pene- 
trated the mysterious truths of consciousness to 
which the memories of those experiences were an 
inlet, will be to these critics but a natural comple- 
ment to his extraordinary grasp on the essential 
and fundamental facts of every-day life, and to 
his power of extracting out of the very pain and 
sorrow and tumult of that life, deep pleasure, joy, 
and tranquility. 

Let us now turn from the speculative side of 
the theory of childhood memories to the practical 
side. No doubt there is something in this doctrine 
that has validity for all alike. The two views we 
have just been discussing are by no means mutually 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 8j 

exclusive. They are not diametrically opposed. It 
is only a question of emphasis, whether the em- 
phasis be placed on the objective, verifiable facts 
of life, or on the inner visions of the mind and the 
unverifiable facts of consciousness. But there is a 
large ground between that is common to both. 
Much of this common ground is in the practical 
and the ordinarily human. Whether we be of a 
scientific or of a mystical temper of mind, it is 
laid upon us all to live largely by some memories 
of the past, for out of the past we construct the 
present and very largely determine the future. 
Childhood memories, purged of all crassness by 
time, are beautiful and pure. They are as good 
to live by as any others, far better than the 
memories, let us say, of some youthful carousal. 
Every one has some memories of childhood — 
innocent, sweet, spontaneous childhood, ignorant, 
inexperienced, and weak though it be — and such 
memories, glorified and idealized, act as vitalizers 
of our living present ; they simplify and purify, 
they bring peace and tranquility, and they produce 
substantial fruits for life. All men in their old 
age revive the memories of childhood. Through 
the influence of strange circumstances and by con- 
scious effort, Wordsworth merely hastened the 
process. Any one can hasten the process by 



84 WORDSWORTH 

conscious efifort. By way of experiment, I fixed 
my mind for a half hour upon some particularly 
pleasing experience of my childhood. The memory 
of that experience grew more and more vivid. 
Forgotten details of the incident came to life. Was 
that little child that figured in the incident really 
I, I myself? I caught the spirit of childhood 
innocency and naturalness. Peace and tranquility 
came. I can fully recommend the experiment to 
persons too much care-worn with the affairs ofj 
this world. The practice of recalling childhood 
experiences can be engaged in by every one. The 
exercise furnishes not only a source of perennial 
charm, but produces a moral and tranquillizing 
effect. 

Another practical phase of the doctrine is that 
when it is connected, as it was in Wordsworth, 
with a general theory of optimism, time and nature 
help to bring about good results with the memories 
of the past. For, if we conceive the world in which 
we live as constitutionally. good instead of evil, and 
that everything tends toward the development of 
the former, then good memories have a better 
chance of surviving in the mind than bad memories. 
And, as time goes on, nature assists the mind in 
purifying the memories of the past and in giving 
them a lovely halo in the present. Even to a less 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 85 

optimistic mind than that of Wordsworth, the 
doctrine is practical, as, for example, to Matthew 
Arnold's mind, for Arnold says that 

Tasks in hours of insight will'd, 

Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd. 

Even as to a stoical mind, the very fulfilment of 
the tasks willed in hours of insight will dispel the 
gloom and lighten the drudgery of life, much more 
will this result follow in an optimistic temper of 
mind. 

There is still another practical observation that 
may be made on this doctrine. It is that in a much 
deeper sense than that of which we are conscious 
our lives have taken their bias from childhood 
experiences. As we grow older we learn more 
and more that what we have been all these years 
has been determined for us largely by the conditional 
of our childhood ; that the very molds of our minds 
have been cast into their characteristic shapes at 
an early and pliable age ; that sometimes the 
slightest incidents of childhood may give a coloring" 
to all our subsequent thoughts and actions : that 
the depth of our insights and sincerity is distinctly 
foreshadowed by the depth of our childish insights 
and serious moments ; that, just as to the boy whom 
the "clififs and islands of Winander" knew so well. 



86 WORDSWORTH 

"a gentle shock of mild surprise has carried far 
into his heart the voice of mountain torrent," so 
the impact of our first impressions has carried far 
into each man's heart those "first-born affinities 
that fit our new existence to existing things." Of 
these facts Wordsworth was far more deeply con- 
scious than we. 

He was also aware that he was wrought upon 
by the experiences of childhood in ways that defied 
conscious exposition. These unconscious and un- 
fathomable workings in the child's mind is what 
gives Wordsworth a profound reverence for child- 
life. This is most touchingly and powerfully ex- 
pressed in the last six lines of the following sonnet, 
which sonnet, it may be said parenthetically, ha 
as many felicitous lines as any sonnet can have, 
since they are all felicitous : 

It is a beauteous evening calm and free, 

The holy time is quiet as a Nun 

Breathless with adoration ; the broad sun 

Is sinking down in its tranquility; 

The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea : 

Listen ! the mighty Being is awake, 

And doth with his eternal motion make 

A sound like thunder — everlastingly. 

Dear Child ! dear Girl ! that walkest with me here, 

If thou appear untouched by solemn thought. 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 87 

Thy nature is not therefore less divine : 
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year; 
And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine, 
God being with thee when we know it not. 

And since God is with the child "when we know 
it not," the ttltimatum of Wordsworth's doctrine 
of childhood memories was left by him, as it must I 
always be left, shrouded in deep mystery. Yet he ' 
had learned, a thing that many of us never do learn, 
that the traditions of our childhood can and ought 
to be the most sacred traditions of the past — 
traditions that will give us the buoyancy of youth, 
that will tend to smooth down the rough places 
in life, that will help to build up and sustain our 
moral being. 

We have now seen that the memories of child- 
hood stood in Wordsworth's mind as a great ethical ] 
reality ; that, due to his opposition to the rational- 
ism and the cold-hearted science of his day and 
to the intensity of his own convictions, he fell into 
exaggerated and sometimes ambiguous statements 
of his doctrine ; that the doctrine is at the bottom 
one of recollection — an immediate memory experi- 
ence accompanied by such an intensity of feeling 
as to produce a state of mind that transcends 
reason ; that men of cool, calculating temperaments 
will never have much sympathy with this doctrine ; 



88 WORDSWORTH 

that men of emotional and mystical temperaments 
will find in it the highest expression of some of 
their deepest intuitions and innermost experiences ; 
that the questions of origin and of time are not 
important in the consideration of the "Ode on 
Intimations of Immortality" ; that the subjective, 
immediate-memory experience, transcending reason 
and time, together with the volitional and 
indomitable spirit in the poet, lie at the core of 
the Ode and give the poem its genuineness and 
permanent vitality ; that men will differ tempera- 
mentally in their judgment on the Ode in the same 
way as on the doctrine of childhood memories ; 
and that, finally, on the practical and ordinarily 
human side, the doctrine of childhood memories 
may have validity for all alike in the following 
points: i. Since we must all live by some memories 
of the past, childhood memories are especially com- 
mendable because they naturally tend to bring 
peace and tranquility. 2. Granting the basis of 
an optimistic scheme of life, we may be sure that 
the best memories will survive and the best 
moments of life will be recalled and lived over 
again. 3. Since the experiences of our childhood 
always deeply mold our subsequent life, it is the 
part of wisdom to recognize them as the most 
sacred traditions of our past. 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 89 

The memories of childhood, however, were not 
only an ethical, but also an aesthetic reality to 
Wordsworth, ^^'e shall, therefore, now turn to 
the study of the subject from the standpoint of 
aesthetics. 



CHAPTER IV 

MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD: THEIR 
ARTISTIC VALUE 

In the preceding chapter a distinction has been 
made between the doctrine of childhood memories 
as held by Wordsworth and one that may be of 
universal practicability. Undoubtedly Wordsworth 
brooded so intensely on his childhood experiences 
that his doctrine in its real essence will never be 
practiced by any considerable number of individ- 
uals ; for it is this degree of intensity rather than 
any peculiar view attached to it that gives the 
doctrine its mark of distinction. It is the degree 
of intensity that produced an illumination in 
Wordsworth's mind, which illumination in turn 
caused him to feel that these memories were an 
inlet into new truths of consciousness. And it must 
further be noted that this intensity could not be 
kept up even in Wordsworth for any great length 
of time, but that it gradually burnt itself out and 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD gr 

produced a hardened and solidifying effect on his 
•character. We need not be surprised to find, 
therefore, that nearly everything that is distinctive 
■concerning this doctrine was expressed within a 
period of about eight years, that is, between the 
time of the composition of "Tintern Abbey" in 1798 
and the completion of the "Ode on Intimations of 
Immortality" in 1806. 

The little poem, "We Are Seven." it is true, 
Avas written before "Tintern Abbey," but here the 
point of view of the poet is comparatively more '• 
objective. The poem is based on a psychological 
observation made upon the mind of a little child 
•eight years of age. The child herself is drawn as 
a simple but an unusual rustic beauty : 

She had a rustic woodland air, 
And she was wildly clad : 
Her eyes were fair, and very fair ; 
— Her beauty made me glad. 

Informed with the spirit of life and vitality, the 
child, Wordsworth found, could only think of her 
dead brother and sister laid in the church-yard as 
really informed with the same life and vitality as 
herself. Though in the closest proximity to death, 
the child could form no notion whatever of the 
meaning of death. In this fact of childhood intuition 
Wordsworth found a strong confirmation of his 



92 WORDSWORTH 

own remembered experience that nothing in child- 
hood had been more difficuk than to admit the 
notion of death as a state applicable to his own 
being. He seems not to have perceived with the 
same clearness, however, that if a child were to be 
qnestioned as to its ideas of abstract principles 
it would be as helpless in this as in forming an 
idea of death, which is but another form of an 
abstraction to the mind. But this somewhat naive 
acceptance of the child's positive notion of life, 
resulting from the indomitable spirit of activity 
within, lies at the root of much of Wordsworth's 
theory and practice of life during the years 
immediately following the recovery of the re- 
actionary influence of the Revolution. And although 
in "We Are Seven" the point of view is somewhat 
objective, the poem already contains the germ of 
the idea that almost completely absorbed Words- 
worth's mind for a time, and that became more 
and more subjective with him until it finally found 
full expression in the "Ode on Intimations of 
Immortality." 

It must be granted also that there are a good 
many poems after 1806 that have to do with child- 
hood. But here the point of view of the poet has 
again become quite objective, and the poems contain 
only such ideas as would be eocpressed by any poet 



MEMORIES OE CHILDHOOD 93 

of power were he to compose poems about children, 
without claiming to hold any distinctive doctrine 
about childhood memories. Such, for example, is 
the poem "Characteristics of a Child Three Years 
Old," which begins with : 

Loving she is, and tractable, though wild ; 
And Innocence hath privilege in her 
To dignify arch looks and laughing eyes. 

This child is a "happy creature," who of herself 

Is all sufficient, solitude to her 
Is blithe society, who fills the air 
With gladness and involuntary songs. 

Such is the poem "The Infant," which likewise 
sets forth the spontaneity of childhood : 

Unquiet Childhood here by special grace 
Forgets her nature, opening like a flower 
That neither feeds nor wastes its vital power 
In painful struggles. 

Such is the poem addressed' to a mother "upon 
the birth of her first-born child": 

Like a ship-wrecked Sailor tost 
By rough waves on a perilous coast, 
Lies the Babe, in helplessness 
And in tenderest nakedness. 
Flung by laboring nature forth 
Upon the mercies of the earth. 



94 WORDSWORTH 

And in this case there is no special need of a pre- 
existent state to give the child power to baffle 
death, for heavenly guardians are constantly brood- 
ing near the child and are breathing upon it 

Something like the faintest breath 
That has power to baffle death — • 
Beautiful, while very weakness 
Captivates like passive meekness. 

These extracts illustrate sufficiently the statement 
that the poems about children after 1806 are sym- 
pathetic studies of the sweetness, meekness, and 
spontaneity of children, and express only such ideas 
as are held in conunon by all lovers of children^ 
To this statement, however, there must im- 
mediately be made one important exception. Once 
only during these years did Wordsworth reproduce 
vividly the magic inward experience based on the 
memory of his childhood. Near the close of the 
poem "composed upon an evening of extraordinary 
splendor and beauty," written in 1818, the trans- 
formation occurs : 

Oh, let thy grace remind me of the light 
Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored ; 
Which, at this moment, on my waking sight 
Appears to shine, by miracle restored ; 
My soul, though yet confined to earth, 
Rejoices in a second birth! 

Though no hard and fast lines can be drawn, the- 



|V MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 93 

quality of this passage is decidedly different from 
the quality of those that have just been quoted. 
Not that this passage is necessarily better poetry 
than the others. Nor is it intended here to convey 
the idea that the poem in which this passage occurs 
is the onh^ great poetry of this period. Professor 
Dowden undoubtedly is right in his insistence 
on the statement that a considerable amount of 
great and original poetry was produced by 
Worthsworth during this period. But the point 
to be seized here is, that, with the single 
exception of the above passage, none of this 
great and original poetry illustrates the doctrine 
of childhood memories in its real essence. Here 
in this passage, however, something is shown to 
have happened in the immediate memory experience 
of the poet. The light shines in as of old. A 
second birth takes place in the mind. The miracle 
of transcendence has occurred and the poet sud- 
denly feels that he has a clear insight into a higher 
kind of truth than the ordinary, or commonplace. 
This is the essence of the doctrine. This passage, 
isolated in its production in point of time from 
those of its own kind, at once possesses the charac- 
teristic intensity of them and avoids the excess 
of overstatement that has been pointed out in some 
of them. 



96 WORDSWORTH 

Although this magic transformation happened 
but once in the productions of later years, the spirit 
of the doctrine of childhood memories occurs in 
poem after poem between the years 1798 and 1806, 
in varying degrees of intensity. At the close of 
Chapter II illustrative passages have been quoted 
from "The Fountain" and the Prelude. This same 
spirit fairly saturates the poems "Influence of 
Natural Objects" and "There Was a Boy," both 
written in 1799. and later incorporated in the 
Prelude, and the poems "My^ Heart Leaps Up" and 
"To Hartley Coleridge," both written in 1802. The 
closing lines of the latter poem may be quoted to 
indicate the temper of these poems : 

Thou art a dewdrop, which the morn brings forth 

111 fitted to sustain unkindly shocks, 

Or to be trailed along the soiling earth ; 

A gem that glitters while it lives, 

And no forewarning gives ; 

But, at the touch of wrong, without a strife 

Slips in a moment out of life — ■ 

asserting that the glittering gem is likely to slip 
in a moment out of life, but implying, according to 
the doctrine, that it can be retained, or, at least, 
reproduced in the memory in after years. The 
spirit of this doctrine is found in "Tintern Abbey" 
with its 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD . gy 

Gleams of half extinguished thought, 
With many recognitions dim and faint, 
And somewhat of a sad perplexity. 
The picture of the mind revives again; — 

with its recreation of the feelings and sensations 
in this passage : 

Sensations sweet 
Felt in the blood and felt along the heart ; 
And passing even into my purer mind, ) 

With tranquil restoration — 

and with its passage of address to the poet's 
sister: 

Thou art with me here upon the banks 
Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend, 
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch 
, The language of my former heart, and read 

My former pleasures in the shooting lights 
Of thy wild eyes. 

The spirit of this doctrine, with somewhat less 
intensity, is found in "Expostulation and Reply" 
with its passage of genuine naivete : 

You look round on your Mother Earth, 

As if she for no purpose bore you ; 

As if you were her first-born birth, ' 

And none had lived before you ; — , 

in the "Lucy" poems, of which the following lines 
must s^rve as an example : 



gS WORDSWORTH 

She died, and left to me 
This heath, this calm, and quiet scene; 
The memory of what has been. 
And never more will be ; — 

in "The Two April Mornings" with its suggestive 
backward look, in the words of Matthew : 

Yon cloud with that long purple cleft 
Brings fresh into my mind 
A day like this which I have left 
Full thirty years behind — 

and with its accompanying picture of incomparable 
beauty of the "blooming girl, whose hair was wet 
with points of morning dew" : 

No fountain from its rocky cave 
E'er tripped with foot so free; 
She seemed as happy as a wave 
That dances on the sea; — 

in the poem "To a Butterfly," which closes with 
the lines : 

We'll talk of sunshine and of song 
And summer days, when we were young, 
Sweet childish days, that were so long 
As twenty days are now. 

Likewise in "Michael" with its famous passage: 

A child more than all other gifts 

That earth can oflfer to declining man 

Brings hope with it and forward looking thoughts;- 



Ji 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 99 

in the "Brothers,"' in the "Sparrow's Nest," in a 
second poem "To a Butterfly," in "It is a Beauteous 
Evening Calm and Free," in "To a Highland Girl," 
in "She Was a Phantom," in the "Ode to Duty," 
in "Louisa" and in the opening lines of "The Happy 
Warrior'" — in all these and still others the spirit 
of the doctrine of childhood memories is found. 
These poems, together with the Prelude, were all 
written during the years following Wordsworth's 
recovery from the reactionary influence of the 
Revolution. So that during this time he kept his 
mind intently concentrated upon the experiences 
of childhood, and was, as he says in the Prelude, 

Loth to quit 
Those recollected hours that have the charm 
Of visionary things, those lovely forms 
And sweet sensations that throw back our life. 
And almost make remote infancy 
A visible scene, on which the sun is shining. 

"Loth" indeed he was "to quit those recollected 
hours that have the charm of visionary things," 
until he had penetrated both their outward and 
inward meaning, had gathered up the power of 
them, and had, with one supreme effort, given them 
an ultimate expression in the "Ode on Intimations 
of Immortality." And immediately after this the 
reaction came. The fire had burned itself out. The 
LOFa 



100 WORDSWORTH 

intensity of it had spent its force ; and Wordsworth 
swiftly passed into another stage of his poetic 
career. 

The chief purpose, however, in citing the above 
poems and in quoting from them has been to show 
that Wordsworth found an aesthetic meaning as 
well as ethical reality in the memories of childhood. 
In the last analysis it will be found that for Words 
worth the chief function of those memories was to 
furnish material for purely artistic purposes. In 
poetry more than in philosophy the ultimate validity 
and worth of a thing depends upon the success 
with which it can be used. And with respect to 
using the memories of childhood in his poetry, it 
must at once be granted that Wordsworth was 
eminently successful. No doubt all poets find the 
memories of childhood an important source of poetic 
material. If we could only enter behind the scenes 
we should most certainly find that Shakespeare 
-drew from this source poetic material of inestimabl 
value. Byron and Tennyson, to mention no others, 
each in his own peculiar way, worked this rich vein 
with success. But there is something in the nature 
and character of the man and in the spirit of the 
times in which he lived that makes Wordsworth, 
in a special sense, the poet of childhood memories.1 

There were in the first place two strongly 



e 

4 



'MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD lor 

divergent tendencies in the character of Words- 
worth. There was a strong- tendency in him toward 
reaHsm. He would see things as they are. He 
would be true to outward facts with scientific 
accuracy. He would write with his eye on the 
object. He would find poetic material right before 
his eyes that would be wrought into a new and 
original kind of poetry. The opposite tendency in 
him was toward spiritualization. He would not 
only see things as they are outwardly, but he would 
"feel the soul of nature and see things as they are," 
inwardly. He would penetrate to the spiritual 
meaning of objects of the slightest outward im- 
portance, with the hope of finding spiritual essence 
of value within. Again, there was a third tendency 
that came to him from the spirit of his times, from 
the spirit of the Romantic movement of which he 
was a part and to which he gave a new impetus. 
This tendency, under the pressure of personal 
liberty and power of personal conviction, was a 
tendency in Wordsworth toward the strange and 
the wonderful. 

Now, the memories of childhood furnish the 
best material for the fusion of these three opposing 
tendencies. First, these memories satisfy the 
requirements of realism, for they have their basis 
in concrete experience, in the personal experience. 



102 WORDSWORTH 

in fact, of the poet himself. Secondly, they are far 
enough removed in point of time to satisfy the 
requirements of romantic strangeness. And thirdly, 
not dominated wholly by the concrete, they are 
easily detached from time and place and readily 
lend themselves to spiritualization and mystic 
interpretation. Wordsworth's scientific sincerity 
and realism prevented him from going outside of 
his personal experience for poetic material, from 
entering a region as remote from the personal as 
that, say, of the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." 
But his desire for strangeness and wonder led him, 
so to speak, to the rim of his personal experience. 
The remote ends of the real and the strange met 
together in the memories of his childhood, which 
could readily be sublimated into a spiritual ex- 
perience. Wordsworth, it may be said in passing, 
was in almost every respect the opposite of Scott. 
But in one respect they were alike, which likeness 
at the same time involves a contrast. They both 
lived much in the past. Scott's past was historic 
feudalism, Wordsworth's past was his own child- 
hood. Scott saw the beautiful and ideal side of 
feudalism, Wordsworth saw the beautiful and ideal 
side of childhood. Each conceived his past in some 
sort of reality. Scott built a castle on the principles 
of feudalism, Wordsworth built a castle, too, with 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 103 

his inheritance of the past — a castle not made with 
hands. 

But the perfect fusion of realism, spiritualization, 
and mystery into an artistic unity is a feat beyond 
the strength of ordinary mortals. It requires a 
strict fidelity to the outward facts of life, a subtle 
and penetrating insight into their inward and 
intuitional meaning, and a voluntary intensity of 
mind which can be sustained alone by deep and 
genuine feelings. The wonder is, not that Words- 
worth failed sometimes, but that he succeeded as 
often as he did. And much of his success must 
be attributed both to his personal instincts and 
the circumstances of his times that led him to make 
use of his childhood memories. The failure in the 
perilous attempt at such a high and rare union is 
nearly always due to following to excess one of 
these three tendencies at the expense of the other 
two. "Alice Fell," "The Thorn," and "Simon Lee," 
are examples that instantly come to mind 
illustrating the domination of . realism, with a 
corresponding lack of spiritual aiTd mystical inter- 
penetration. The poem "Gypsies'" is a familiar 
example of too bold and over-wrought spiritual- 
ization for the slight outward incident of the poem. 
And there are passages in the Prelude which, even 
to a man of a mystical temperament, one can fancy, 



104 WORDSWORTH 

the mystery is tantalizingly just beyond the point 
of any satisfactory understanding. It is more 
pleasant, however, to dwell on instances which 
show Wordsworth's success in this respect, and 
nowhere, as has already been intimated, is he more 
successful than when the magic of childhood 
memories blends together the real and the strange 
into an artistic union of spiritual experience. 

Although exhaustive treatment in the way of 
illustration can not be entered upon here, yet one 
illustration, which is at once the most beautiful 
and the most perfect, must be given. It is the 
poem "To the Cuckoo," a poem which Wordsworth 
himself placed first in merit among his shorter 
productions. The idea of mystery which pervades 
and underlies the whole poem is slightly suggested 
in the first stanza : 

blithe Newcomer ! I have heard, 

1 hear thee and rejoice. 

O Cuckoo ! shall I call thee Bird, 
Or but a wandering Voice ? 

In the next two stanzas the necessary outward 
facts, the situation, and the immediate sense per- 
ceptions of the poem are given, but at the close 
of these stanzas there is again a suggestion of 
mystery slightly stronger than the first : 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 105 

While I am lying on the grass 

Thy two-fold shout I hear, ' 

From hill to hill it seems to pass, 

At once far off, and near. 

Though babbling only to the Vale, 
Of sunshine and of flowers, 
Thou bringest unto me a tale 
Of visionary hours. 

In the next stanza the mystery is more pronounced,, 
and the "even yet" suggests that this impression 
of mystery had been experienced before : 

Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring! 

Even yet thou art to me 

No bird, but an invisible thing, 

A voice, a mystery. 

And then suddenly the whole scene, as by magic, 
is thrown back to "those recollected hours that 
have the charm of visionary things," and romantic 
strangeness is added to mystery : 

The same whom in my school-boy days 
I listened to ! that Cry 
Which made me look a thousand ways. 
In bush, and tree, and sky. 

To seek thee did I often rove 
Through \\oods and on the green; 
And thou wert still a hope, a love; 
Still longed for, never seen. 



io6 WORDSWORTH 

And now the scene is suddenly brought back to the 
immediate present, producing that subjective trans- 
formation which the spell of childhood memories 
always wrought upon Wordsworth : 

And I can listen to thee yet; 
Can lie upon the plain 
And listen, till I do beget 
That golden time again. 

And this potent charm of inward delight makes the 
ordinary outward world of reality fade into "an 
insubstantial faery place'' : 

O blessed Bird ! this earth we pace 
Again appears to be 
An unsubstantial faery place 
That is fit home for Thee. 

This is perhaps the finest example of the perfect 
harmony of sense-perceptions, childhood memories, 
spiritualization. and m)^stery that can be found in 
the language. And it is chiefly the potency of 
childhood memories that deepens and vitalizes the 
meaning of the ordinary cry of an ordinary bird, 
and creates in the soul an inward light and joy of 
such intense reality that the outward world seems 
to fioat in a faery-like and insubstantial substance. 
The memories of childhood, then, have a real 
aesthetic meaning and an artistic function of ab- 
solute worth and validity. When the doctrine of 



MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 107 

pre-existence (whether Wordsworth held it or not) 
shall have failed, and when our perspective of 
•childhood generally shall have been proved by 
science to be false, the memories of childhood will 
still and forever remain a vital source of poetic 
material to satisfy deeply the artistic impulse in 
us toward the beautiful and the true. And the 
world shall have long to wait before another child 
of genius shall come who shall extract as deep and 
tmalloyed pleasures from this source as did William 
Wordsworth, the supreme poet, not of childhood, 
iDut of childhood memories : 

With heart as calm as lakes that sleep, 

In frosty moonlight glistening ; 

Or mountain rivers, where they creep 

Along a channel smooth and deep, 

To their own far-off murmurs listening. 



CHAPTER V 

MYSTICISM: ITS DEVELOPMENT 

The stuff which a true poet principally makes 
use of is that which comes to him from first-hand 
experience, and from such experience that gives 
genuine pleasure. But the moment of pleasure 
which the poet wishes to seize and enshrine in his 
poem, is, when drawn from experience, a thing of 
the past — always something of yesterday. With 
the exquisite sense for pleasure values that belongs 
to a poet, he will attempt to snatch from devouring 
time the thing of beauty, give it permanent ex- 
pression, and really make it a joy forever. The 
point, or points, of his past experience upon which 
the poet will most habitually fix his'attention will 
depend upon the character of the poet and the 
conditions and circumstances of his environment. 
On account of particular traits in his character and 
peculiar circumstances into which he was thrown,. 
AVordsworth, we have seen, fixed his attention, more 



MYSTICISM 109 

than other poets, upon the experiences of his child- 
hood. We have also seen that the experiences of 
•childhood which had value for him were those that 
were bound up with his interest in nature. We 
have had abundant proof that, in his effort of 
recollection to produce an immediate subjective 
■experience in the mind, there was present a deep 
strain of what is called the mystical. But when the 
memory of those experiences is connected with 
•outward sense perceptions there is produced a still 
deeper strain of the mystical, as in the poem "To 
a Cuckoo." And when Wordsworth attaches a 
moral value to this double experience of memory 
images and sense perceptions, as in "Tintern 
Abbey," the full tide of the mystical is on. 

The general outline of thought in "Tintern 
Abbey" is as follows : First, the picture of the 
mind is revived. The landscape, the plots of cottage- 
ground, the orchard-tufts, the grove's and copses, 
the hedge rows, "little lines of sportive wood run 
wild," the pastoral farms, the wreathes of smoke — 
all these beauteous forms, through a long absence, 
had not been to the poet as a landscape to a blind 
man's eye, but had frequently been partially revived 
in his mind. But now, as he stood in the very 
presence of the beauteous forms themselves the 
memory of them was revived in full measure. 



no WORDSWORTH 

Secondly, there is a development of immediate sense 

perceptions — perceptions of 

The meadows and the woods, 
And mountains ; and of all that we behold 
From this green earth ; of all the mighty world 
Of eye and ear — both what they half create, 
And what perceive. 

And thirdly, a moral value is given to this double 
experience of memory and sense perceptions. 
"Therefore am I," he says, 

Well pleased to recognize 
In nature and the language of the sense. 
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being. 

And in the same strain of moral interpretation he 

adds : 

Nature never did betray 
The heart that loved her ; 'tis her privilege, 
Through all the years of this our life, to lead 
From joy to joy; for she can so inform 
The mind that is within us, so impress 
With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, 
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men. 
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
The dreary intercourse of daily life, 
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold 
Is full of blessings. 



MYSTICISM III 

The genesis of giving such a high moral value 
to the power of nature working through memory 
and the senses, is important and instructive in the 
history of the development of the poet's mind. It 
will be remicmbered that in the crisis following his 
over-wrought interest in the Revolution, Words- 
worth considered that his soul had attained its "last 
and lowest ebb" when "wearied out with con- 
trarities" he "yielded up moral questions in 
despair." But it is a fair question to ask whether 
Wordsworth actually gave up moral questions com- 
pletely. It is to be suspected rather that his nature 
so imperatively demanded moral solace that he 
could not give up the moral problem at all. No 
doubt for a time he made conscious efiforts to avoid 
the contrarities of moral issues ; but even "The 
Borderers," which was written in his despondency, 
is much greater as a study in the moral nature of 
man than as a play. He makes Marmaduke, the 
young hero of the play, say to Oswald, his tempter : 

Young as I am, I might go forth a teacher. 
And you should see how deeply I could reason 
Of love in all its shapes, beginnings, ends; 
Of moral qualities in their diverse aspects ; 
Of actions, and their laws and tendencies. 

And so Wordsworth really never ceased reasoning 
of love in all its shapes, of moral qualities, and of 



112 WORDSWORTH 

actions ; and the poems written immediately after 
his recovery are steeped with moral sentiment. 
In the poem "To My Sister" he writes : 

Love, now a universal birth, 
From heart to heart is stealing, 
From earth to man, from man to earth : 
— It is the hour of feeling. 

One moment now may give us more 
Than years of toiling reason : 
Our minds shall drink at every pore 
The spirit of the season. 

Some silent laws our hearts will make 
Which they shall long obey : 
, We for the year to come may take 

Our temper from today. 

And from the blessed power that rolls 
About, below, above, 
We'll frame the measure of our souls : 
They shall be tuned to love. 

The mind, drinking at every pore the spirit of the 
season, and the heart, taking its temper from the 
day, are attuned to the highest law of morals — the 
law of love. In "Expostulation and Reply" we have 
this passage : 

The eye — it cannot choose but see ; 
We cannot bid the ear be still ; 
Our bodies feel, where'er they be. 
Against or with our will. 



MYSTICISM 113 

Nor less I deem that there are Powers 
Which of themselves our minds impress ; 
That we can feed this mind of ours 
In a wise passiveness. 

This mind of ours is to be fed through the eye and 
the ear by the powers of nature — "this mighty sum 
of things forever speaking." And in "The Tables 
Turned" the poet says : 

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings! 
He, too, is no mean preacher : 
Come forth into the light of things, 
Let Nature be your teacher. 

She has a world of ready wealth, 
Our hearts and minds to bless — 
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, 
Truth breathed by cheerfulness. 

One impulse from a vernal wood 
May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good, 
Than all the sages can. 

These passages all possess an tmmistakable moral 
temper, and the source of their strength lies in 
extracting moral nurture from "the blessed power 
that rolls about, below, above," from drawing upon 
the "ready wealth" of nature and allowing her to 
be our teacher. It may be that to some persons 
impulses from vernal woods cannot teach anything 
of moral evil or of good, as Morley would have it ; 



114 WORDSWORTH 

but they greatly err who maintain that Wordsworth 
did not find this the prime source of moral strength. 
What happened to Wordsworth, then, is not that 
he gave up the consideration of moral questions, 
which was impossible to a nature like his, but that 
he ceased to look for moral strength in the social 
and political philosophies of his day. And, thrown 
back upon the dignity and strength of his own inner 
life, he revived the memories of childhood, joined 
them to outward sense perceptions, and in that 
double process, he rediscovered himself — his moral 
nature. From thenceforth those memory and sense 
impressions became the vehicle of expression for 
his inner moral life. It was through his reaction, 
therefore, on the French Revolution that Words- 
worth's eyes were opened and that his peculiar 
moral principles were formulated. And, carrying 
the revolutionary method and spirit with him, he 
would teach men the new principles. He would 
explain to them how to build up their moral being. 
He would readjust society on a new and simple 
basis, on the basis of the primal affections and 
moral strength derived through memory and sense 
from the powers of nature. Thus, with the intensity 
and wholeheartedness characteristic of Revolution- 
ary leaders, Wordsworth became the prophet and 
leader of a new moral and revolutionary movement. 



MYSTICISM 115 

But this synthesis of memory images, sense 
perceptions, and a moral idea by a mind that is 
voHtional and passionate, is eminently productive 
of a mystical state of mind. When the most com- 
mon ideas that are naturally remote from each 
other, are held in close juxtaposition under the 
stress of passion, the mystical state of mind always 
results. There is, therefore, some mystical deposit 
in every human constitution, but the quantity of it 
is greater in some individuals than in others. There 
was in Wordsworth, to start with, an unusually 
great deposit of the mystical consciousness. The 
original powers of his mind — the powers of 
sensitiveness, passion and volition — were well fitted 
to de^•elop the mystical. In his earliest childhood, 
he made elaborate preparations to bring on the 
mystical state, although, of course, he was not then 
conscious of their meaning. 

Again, in some periods of history more than in 
others, the spirit of the times favors the develop- 
ment of the mystical. The age of Pope, for example, 
with its aversion to passion and to any new and 
strange combination of ideas, was decidedly un- 
favorable to the development of it. If, in that age, 
a young person were possessed by nature with a 
large deposit of mystical tendencies, the spirit of 
the times would help him to hush them up, would 



ii6 IVORDSWORTIT 

deaden them for him, and finally destroy them. 
This is why no mystics appeared in the age of 
Pope. The age of Wordsworth, on the contrary, 
with its revolutionary tendencies, with its efforts 
at the readjustment of society in new and strange 
ways, with its insistence on personal freedom, and 
with its powerful emphasis on personal convictions, 
was emphatically favorable to the development of 
the mystical. What the spirit of the times did for 
Wordsworth was to encourage him to bring to 
light and to perfect the elaborate mystical practices 
of his childhood. In tracing their development, 
then, we must recur again to the experiences of his 
childhood. 

One precaution, however, is necessary at this 
point. It is not profitable to trace this development 
closely in the sequence of time. For the mystical 
[proper, that is, the pure mystical state, is not ■ 
developed gradually in the mind and then 
permanently possessed. It is rather a state of mind 
that is arrived at occasionally, and held transitorily, 
and with irregular recurrence. It is altogether too 
intense and strained to be permanently possessed. 
What is more important, therefore, is to note in 
its development the degree of intensity it has 
reached, and the different stages of its development 
marked by that degree of intensity. 



MYSTICISM 117 

The simplest rudiment of mystical experience 
is based upon the most common experiences of 
humanity, and is developed out of them. It deals 
with 

Unshaped half-human thoughts 

Which solitary Nature feeds 

'Mid summer storms or winter's ice. 

Strange, unshaped. half-human thoughts come to 
all of us and out of them the will builds its mystic 
temple. The heart of the mystic, on the basis of 
common experience, tends to 

Luxuriate with indifferent things, 
Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones 
And on the vacant air. 

The following characterization of Peter Bell 
is universally recognizable, yet it expresses such 
rigidity and fixedness of attention that it un- 
mistakably possesses the rudiment of the mystical 
experience : 

There was a hardness in his cheek, 
There was a hardness in his eye. 
As if the man had fixed his face, 
In many a solitary place 
Against the wind and open sky! 

These passages represent the most common 
experiences, but they also possess the germ of the 



ii8 WORDSWORTH 

mystical consciousness, the suggestion of deeper 
strains of fixed attention. They represent the very 
beginnings of the mystical state of mind. 

When, however, the kindliness that is wasted 
"on stocks and stones, and on the vacant air" 
becomes more intense, when the face that is fixed 
"in many a solitary place, against the wind and 
open sky" becomes more passionately fixed, then 
a higher and more distinct stage of the mystical 
presence is recognizable and it becomes more 
clearly separated from other experiences. Not only 
did Wordsworth as a lover fix his eye upon the 
moon that descended to Lucy's cot, but when he 
came home from school on vacation and lay down 
in his accustomed bed he tells us with what fixed- 
ness he aforetimes had gazed upon the moon : 

That lowly bed whence I had heard the wind 
Roar, and the rain beat hard ; where I so oft 
Had lain awake on summer nights to watch 
The moon in splendor couched among the leaves 
Of a tall ash, that near our cottage stood ; 
Had watched her with fixed eyes while to and fro 
In the dark summit of the waving tree 
She rocked with every impulse of the breeze. 

Even the grave of a dead companion is of sufficient 
interest to arouse the active but mute gazing 
tendency: 



MYSTICISM 119 

The grassy churchyard hangs 
Upon a slope above the village school, 
And through that churchyard when my way was led 
On summer evenings, I believe that there 
A long half hour together I have stood 
Mute, looking at the grave in which he lies! 

Not only do we learn that Wordsworth "gazed and 
gazed" at the daffodils, but often "gleams of sky 
and clouds and intermingling mountain tops, in 
one inseparable glory clad" bring on the rapt gaze : 

On the fulgent spectacle 
That neither passed away nor changed, I gazed 
Enrapt. 

In the above passages the common qualities are 
volitional activity, fixed attention and deep stirrings 
of the feelings. They are well on the way toward 
the distinctly mystical consciousness. 

Representative passages of a more highly 
developed stage — a stage in which sense perceptions 
begin to pale in the intense light of memory and 
vision, and in which the moral and spiritual idea 
is present — are the following: 

I would stand, 
If the night blackened with a coming storm, 
Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are 
The ghostly language of the ancient earth, 
Or make their dim abode in distant winds. 



120 WORDSWORTH 

Thence did I drink the visionary power ; 
And deem not profitless those fleeting moods 
Of shadowy exultation. 

And the reason why he hstens so intently and 
deems the exercise profitable is that the "soul 
retains an obscure sense of possible sublimity," and 
that it is through such an exercise that the sense 
of its sublimity is heightened. Memory, sense per- 
ceptions, and the moral idea are beautifully brought 
together in this passage. Likewise in the passage: 
Oh, then, the calm 
And dead still water lay upon my mind 
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, 
Never before so beautiful, sank down 
Into my heart, and held me like a dream ! 

In the following passage the light of sense goes 
out altogether under the volitional intensity of the 
inner gaze, and the outer world of reality again 
becomes "an insubstantial faery place" : 

And sate among the woods 
Alone upon some jutting eminence, 
At the first gleam of dawn-light, when the Vale, 

Yet slumbering, lay in utter solitude 

Oft in these moments such a holy calm 
Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes 
Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw 
Appeared like something in myself, a dream 
A prospect in the mind. 

And likewise in the passage : 



MYSTICISM 121 

But to my conscious soul I now can say 
"I recognize thy glory" ; in such strength 
Of usurpation, when the light of sense 
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed 
The invisible world — 

the light of sense goes out with a flash, and, in a 
flash, the invisible world, a new order of moral and 
spiritual truth is revealed ; physical sense is 
transcended, and we have duly arrived at the 
mystic's rapturous state of mind. 

Just at the vanishing point of the senses is 
where the mystical proper, the pure mystical, 
begins. And the completest expression of the 
highest stage of it is found in a passage in "Tintern 
Abbey." To the beauteous forms that through a 
long absence had not been to him like a landscape 
to a blind man's eye, Wordsworth says he owed 
a gift of sublime aspect, the gift of 

That blessed mood, 
In which the burthen of the mystery, 
In which the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world, 
Is lightened : — that serene and blessed mood, 
In which the affections gently lead us on — 
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame 
And even the motion of our human blood 
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
In body, and become a living soul : 



122 WORDSWORTH 

While with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
We see into the life of things. 

The critics have been loud in their praise of this 
famous passage. Stedman, for example, speaks of 
it as having been produced when Wordsworth's 
vision penetrated the quintessence of nature, and 
when he was "in his very highest mood." One 
wonders whether after the burden of the mystery 
and the heavy and the weary weight of all this 
unintelligible world is lightened, and after the 
motion of our human blood is almost suspended 
and we are laid asleep in body — whether then our 
being is in the proper condition to enter the very 
highest experience known to men. One wonders 
what acttially is seen when "we see into the life of 
things." One naturally asks what are the fruits for 
life of such a rare experience. Wordsworth himself 
is wholly in doubt about the value of the experience 
and its consequent results, for he immediately adds : 

If this 
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh ! how oft — . . . 
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, 
O sylvan Wye ! thou wanderer thro' the woods — 

and we again suddenly find ourselves in an 
intelligible world. In fact, what has generally been 
considered contemplation par excellence is con- 



MYSTICISM 123 

lemplation in excess. After having committed the 
•excess Wordsworth's essential sanity makes him 
retract immediately and take more easily tenable 
grounds. The passage, however, is a profound and 
delicate rendering of a possible and somewhat 
unusual mood. The description of the process by 
which the mind enters into this mood is delicately 
accurate. First the ordinary burdens of life are 
removed and the mystery of the unintelligible 
world is lightened, that is, since there is no 
absoluteness but only relativity of knowledge of 
our ordinary life, that knowledge is renounced as 
an unintelligible world of knowledge, categories 
of thought are given up, all distinctions of grades 
and degrees are obliterated ; and what remains is 
a mood divested of intellectual content, an ab- 
straction without any concrete counterpart. Next 
the human blood, smelling entirely too much of 
earthiness, is suspended in its action, the body is 
laid asleep, and the soul, having transcended 
physical experience, enters into the "blessed con- 
sciousness of unutterable reality." 

The result of this intense excitation of the mind 
is to produce two qualities which Professor William 
James declares to be two of the chief qualities of 
mysticism, namely, the noetic quality and that of 
inefYability. According to the first, "we see into 



124 WORDSWORTH 

the life of things." These states of mind are "states- 
of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by 
the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, 
revelations full of significance and importance.'" 
According to the second quality — inefifability — the 
experience in this state of mind remains inarticulate 
"The subject immediately says that no adequate 
report of its contents can be given. ... It cannot 
be imparted or transferred to others." For lack 
of a sufficient number of points of connection with 
ordinary life and of adequate terms of expression 
the mystic can never communicate to others the 
wonderful truths which he beholds. 

To put the description of the process in other 
words, the necessary conditions for producing this 
extraordinary state of mind seem to be the mental 
act of forcing the feelings to divest themselves of 
their ordinary contents of concrete material and 
the imagination of its ordinary intellectual content, 
and to fix themselves upon some abstract spot — 
which spot in some mysterious way begins to 
illuminate under the focus of the feelings and 
imagination. Under the strained condition into 
which the will has forced the feelings and the 
imagination a new order of truth is generated by 
them, great gleams of light flash out in a thousand 
directions from the radiating center, vast strata 



MYSTICISM 125 

of wonderful truth are revealed. But when the 
illuminating- process has once fairly set in, the will, 
which has been the chief power at work thus far, 
is temporarily held in abeyance, and for a short 
time the subject "sees into the life of things." 

It is a long way from the point where the heart 
rather indifferently wastes "its kindliness on stocks 
and stones, and on the vacant air" to the point 
where its experience is so intense that it sees, or 
thinks it sees, "into the life of things." We have 
traced out a number of more or less distinct inter- 
.mediary stages. We have seen that the very 
highest stage is for the most part a moral and 
intellectual abstraction ; yet it always held a certain 
charm for Wordsworth : 

Mighty is the charm 
Of those abstractions to a mind beset 
With images and haunted by herself, 
And specially delightful unto me 
Was that clear synthesis built up aloft 
So gracefull3^ 

His mind, haunted as it was by concrete images, 
delighted to penetrate through the images and build 
up a clear synthesis aloft and gracefully out of the 
inner meanings and abstractions suggested by these 
images. Almost constantly, however, Wordsworth 
remained just below the very highest stage of the 



126 WORDSWORTH 

mystical. His method seems to have been to force 
his way as near to it as possible without losing the 
vitality of passion and of concrete representation. 
Here, in the next to the highest stage of the 
mystical, where the light of sense does not quite 
go out, where ordinarily intelligible distinctions 
lemain, lies the most distinctive and the most solid 
part of his work. Here is where the synthesis of 
memory images, sense perceptions, and the moral' 
idea, is most efifectively made. It is on this level 
of the mystical that Wordsworth must be tested. 
It is our next task, therefore, to consider the 
meaning and validity of this mystical synthesis. 



CHAPTER VI 

MYSTICISM : ITS ETHICAL MEANING 

The power of volition, of self-control, which is 
true freedom, and the power of deep and intuitive 
feelings, feelings of love, faith, joy, rapture — these 
are the foundation stones of Wordsworth's mys- 
ticism. The union of these powers is the union 
of what is highest in man — self-control and freedom 
— and of what is best in child life — passionate love, 
faith, joy, and rapture. Volition and self-control 
save the feelings from sentimentality, and from the 
malign opprobrium with which cold-hearted critics 
are wont to treat them. Thus Wordsworth attained 
to a high dignity of life and at the same time 
retained the simplicity of a child. Though the union 
of these powers can hardly attain to the dignity of 
a philosophic system of thought, yet the powers 
themselves are grounded deep in the common heart 
of man. They are little influenced by the accidents 
of time or place, or by the force of environment. 



128 WORDSWORTH 

It is for this reason that after a century (the Nine- 
teenth Century) of prodigious efforts to lay bare 
the heart of nature and to discover her laws, of a 
vast collection of facts concerning her, giving us 
new and profound insights into her mysterious 
workings, the treatment of her by Wordsworth is 
still fresh "with points of morning dew" and has 
lost scarcely any of its meaning and vitality. With 
the grasp of a giant, Wordsworth seized upon the 
permanent and fundamental qualities of volition 
and passion, at a point where man is not an object 
apart from the vast forces that surround him and 
play upon his life, but at a point where he is 
essentially in harmony with the forces that are 
constantly "breathing grandeur upon the humblest 
face of human life." 

Why, then, should there be any question as to 
the meaning and validity of Wordsworth's mystical 
synthesis of memory images, sense perceptions and 
the moral idea. The question of doubt is not 
usually raised with regard to the foundation upon 
which it rests — although that may be questioned, 
too, but with regard to the particular synthesis 
Wordsworth built on that foundation. Is the way 
of memory and the senses the true way of life? 
Does moral virtue really flow from the heart of 
•external nature into the heart of man? Is not this 



MYSTICISM 129 

synthesis of memory, sense, and the moral idea 
a factitious synthesis, and is it not true that the 
quicker we get rid of the ilhision the better? Many 
great and wise men have been against Wordsworth 
on this score. We have seen in our study of 
childhood memories and the "Intimations of Im- 
mortality" that critics were temperamentally divided 
on the question of the validity of those memories. 
But here the temperamental dififerences are more 
highly accentuated. There are represented here 
two widely different ways of approaching some of 
the most important problems of life — the common- 
; sense way and the mystical way. The common- 
! sense way holds in contempt the intuitions, the 
dreams, and the raptures of the mystic. The mystic 
way seems to subvert into strange and interfusing 
presences the facts of every-day life that ought to 
be taken as a matter of course. And perhaps 
between these two ways of thinking, and especially 
of feeling, no reconciliation can ever be made. The 
only thing that can be done is to show, with as 
much sympathy as possible, how far common sense 
and reasonableness will be on the side of Words- 
worth's way of feeling about the important facts 
of life involved in his synthesis. 

It has just been said that since the powers of 
volition and passion, which are made the ground- 

9 



130 li'ORDSWORTH 

work of Wordsworth's mysticism, are deeply 
grounded in the heart of man, they are not much 
influenced by the accidents of time or place or by 
the force of environment. But not so with the 
particular synthesis he built on that groundwork. 
That was due mainly to the accidents of his times 
and to his particular environment. Have given 
the man, his early surroundings, and the peculiar 
circumstances of his life that we have previously 
traced out, and the result must be this particular 
synthesis. Mysticism manifests itself in outward 
expression in many forms. Mysticism is intuitive, 
deeply subjective, close to the very inner core of 
life, to the very "beatings of the human heart." 
But it craves outward expression; and just because 
it is so deeply from within, its outward expression 
differs in different individuals. Men do not differ 
much in their statement of an outward fact of life, 
say, of the statement of the law of gravitation. It 
is objective and verifiable. But in the expression 
of an inner experience a man must recur to some 
form of pictorial or symbolical language. He must 
work by hints and suggestions ; and the mystic 
experience on its way to outward expression may 
take diverse courses. Cathedrals, angels, seraphs, 
symbolism ready made from the Bible, may serve 
as a channel of expression for the different 



MYSTICISM 131 

hierarchial stages of mystical excellence, as in 
Swedenborg. Nature may even be mystically 
interpreted in terms of Biblical symbols, as in 
Newman. In speaking of the angels, Newman says, 
"Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, 
every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts 
of their garments, the waving of the robes of those 
whose faces see God." And the Catholic Church, 
with its hierarchy of officers and its ritualistic forms 
of worship, may serve as an outward embodiment 
of the religious and mystical consciousness. So in 
Wordsworth, different from Swedenborg and from 
Newman respectively, the objects and powers of 
external nature furnished the embodiment and 
means of expression of his mystical and religious 
consciousness. 

But the tone in which we have just been 
speaking of the mystics and their symbols is by 
no means the tone in which they themselves speak. 
The precise difficulty with them is that they take 
themselves together with their symbols, with ab- 
solute seriousness ; and this is what alienates the 
critics. Swedenborg's religion to him is the true 
religion. Catholicism to Newman is the only right 
religion. And Wordsworth feels that he actually 
draws unbounded moral and religious strength from 
the heart of external nature. The synthesis stands 



132 WORDSWORTH 

in his mind as an absolute fact, and admits of no 
doubt. In the words of Tennyson, this state of 
mind is "not a confused state, but the clearest, the 
surest of the surest, utterly beyond words." It 
is not the result of imagination, so called, but of 
bare and unaided vision. Undoubtedly any and 
all of these mystics make too great claims for their 
particular formulas as means of the development 
of character and life. They are too insistent in 
making their particular cures the panacea for all 
ills. A specific formula cannot have universal 
validity. The method of each one, and of Words- 
worth especially, is a little too exclusive. Moral 
strength does not flow so exclusively from external 
nature. Is it not possible that from the atmosphere 
enveloping religious ceremonies — great cathedrals, 
elaborate rituals, accumulations of historic associa- 
tions — moral strength may flow into the mind as 
effectively as from external nature? And is it not 
true that these systems need not be mutually 
exclusive? With these limitations in mind, let us 
see what may be said in favor of Wordsworth's 
mystical synthesis in particular. 

First, we cannot really exclude the forces of 
nature from us if we will. Whatever transcendental 
qualities man may possess he has evolved out of 
the very heart of nature, and is completely 



MYSTICISM 133 

enveloped by her through his whole life. He is 
fortunate if he can live where he can tread the solid 
earth and can see the sky overhead. It is not 
disputed that men, for their moral as well as their 
physical well-being, should live in wholesome sun- 
shine and in the presence of blowing breezes a 
good part of their lives. These are the primal 
necessities of life, and just as Wordsworth in his 
poetry would use "a selection of language really 
used by men," so in the appropriation of primal 
necessities he would use a strictly selective process. 
He would not be blind to the destructive power 
of "the lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling 
waves," but he would select the best portion of 
natural influences. He would not all his life breathe 
the murky atmosphere of a great city, but would 
choose to let the "motions of delight that haunt 
the sides of the green hills" touch his life. He 
would allow the brooks, muttering "a busy noise 
by day, a quiet sound in silent night," the waves 
and the groves, to play upon his life and mold his 
character. All this we must let Wordsworth him- 
self tell in his own incomparable "selection of 
language really used by men" : 

Ye motions of delight that haunt the sides 
Of the green hills ; ye breezes and soft airs, 
Whose subtle intercourse with breathing flowers. 



134 WORDSWORTH 

Feelingly watched, might teach Man's haughty race 
How without injury to take, to give 
Without offence ; ye who, as if to show 
The wondrous influence of power gently used. 
Bend the complying heads of lordly pines. 
And, with a touch, shift the stupendous clouds 
Through the whole compass of the sky ; ye brooks, 
Muttering along the stones, a busy noise 
By day, a quiet sound in the silent night; 
Ye waves, that out of the great deep steal forth 
In a calm hour to kiss the pebbly shore. 
Not mute, and then retire, fearing no storm ; 
And you, ye groves, whose ministry it is 
To interpose the covert of your shades. 
Even as a sleep, between the heart of man 
And outward troubles, between man himself. 
Not seldom, and his own uneasy heart: 
Oh ! that I had a music and a voice 
Harmonious as your own that I might tell 
What ye have done for me. 

This indeed sounds beautifully mystical, but it 
may become a practical reality to any man. At 
least, no man is capable to judge what nature can 
or can not do for him until he has given her, at 
her best, a fair and reasonable chance. 

Secondly, it lies within the power of a man's 
will to make Wordsworth's mystical synthesis his 
own. Although his method may not be exclusive 
of all others, it will work if one but gives it a 



MYSTICISM 135 

cliancc. If one puts himself in the way of it, it will 
produce character of a high order. To start with, 
Wordsworth demands manliness, that is, humility 
and courage, of every individual. Then one musr 
use his luill — this is Wordsworth's peculiar lesson. 
(3ne must will with mental alertness, not with 
mental laziness, to give himself up, not passively, 
but "in a ivise passiveness," to the powers that 
are forever speaking. For the majority of human 
beings it is a very hard task to be wisely passive 
in the presence of great and enduring objects. It 
is vastly easier to engage in a constant round of 
aimless, nervous, and sporadic activities, which 
really is mere passiveness. There is, therefore, a 
wide difiference between mere passivity and wise 
passiveness. And when that difference is taken 
fully into account, the combination of a moral idea 
and the life of the senses is not as factitious as it 
may seem. 

In the third place, there is nothing degrading 
in the life of the senses themselves when under 
proper restraint. It is only when they are made 
an end in themselves that they are not elevating. 
It is not only the will that puts a restraint on the 
life of the senses, according to Wordsworth, but 
memory also has an important purifying power. 
The tone of much criticism on Wordsworth's 



136 IVORDSIVORTH 

interpretation of nature is as though he held that 
the power of high morals came only and immedi- 
ately from and through the senses. This is 
essentially unfair to Wordsworth's interpretation. 
For the power of memory, as we have already 
partially seen, plays an important part in Words- 
worth's scheme of things. It is not only what the 
eye and ear perceive, but what they half-create that 
gives value to an experience with nature. And the 
half-creating power of the mind lies in previous 
experiences conserved and carried forward by the 
means of memory, and present in every act of the 
mind. "What want we?" he asks in the "Recluse"; 

Have we not perpetual streams, 
Warm woods, and sunny hills, and fresh green fields. 
And mountains not less green, and flocks and herds, 
And thickets full of songsters, and the voice 
Of lordly birds, an unexpected sound 
Heard now and then from morn to latest eve, 
Admonishing the man who walks below 
Of solitude and silence in the sky? 
These have we and a thousand nooks of earth 
Have also these, but nowhere else is found. 
Nowhere (or is it fancy?) can be found 
The one sensation that is here ; 'tis here, 
Here as it found its way into my heart 
In childhood, here as it abides by day, 
By night, here only; or in chosen minds 
That take it with them hence, where'er they go. 



MYSTICISM 137 

— 'Tis, but I cannot name it, 'tis the sense 
Of majesty, and beauty, and repose, 
A blended holiness of earth and sky. 
Something that makes this individual spot, 
This small abiding place of many men, 
A termination, and a last retreat, 
A center, come from wheresoe'er you will, 
A whole without dependence or defect, 
Made for itself, and happy in itself. 
Perfect contentment. Unity entire. 

It is the "one sensation'' that found its way into 
Wordsworth's heart in his childhood and that in 
chosen minds goes with them wherever they go. 
that possesses a power to purify and hallow the 
present life of the senses. And when "the sense 
of majesty, and beauty, and repose, a blended holi- 
ness of earth and sky" join with the power of 
memory, not only to purify and hallow, but to 
restrain and control the life of the senses — do we 
not have here a synthesis, mystical though it be, 
that commends itself to reason and to common 
sense? 

The final test, however, of Wordsworth's mys- 
ticism is the test of the foundation upon which its 
synthesis rests. It is "the mind of man," Words- 
worth says, that is "my haunt, the main region of 
my song." The mystical experience, after all, is 
mainly a subjective experience, whatever outward 



138 WORDSWORTH 

■expressions and connections it may have. "Words- 
worth," says Emerson, "alone in his time, treated 
the human mind well, and with an absolute trust." i 
And it was a trust in the mind's power of self- 
direction and self-support — its power of will. "The 
trait," says Morley, "that really places Wordsworth 
on an eminence above his poetic contempories, and 
ranks him, as the ages are likely to rank hiifi, on 
a line just short of the greatest of all time, is his 
direct appeal to will and conduct." We have 
already seen that in the production of poetry the 
will has two functions to fulfil — to reproduce by 
a species of reactions a former emotion and to hold 
under restraint the new emotion. In the process 
of life the will has still greater functions to fulfil, i 
First of all, by the doctrine of recollection, it is ' 
to conserve and transmute all that is valuable of 
former experiences. Secondly, it is to hold the eyes \ 
and the ears, heart and mind, close to the bosom 
of mother earth : 

Long have I loved what I behold — 

The night that calms, the day that cheers ; 

The common growth of mother earth 

Suffices me — her tears, her mirth, 

Her humblest mirth and tears. 

And thirdly, the heart must "watch and receive." 
Man is to "live within the light of high endeavors," 



MYSTICISM 139 

and when he does so, he "daily spreads abroad his 
being armed with strength that cannot fail." 

There is naturally a certain similarity at this 
point between the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the 
great philosophical exponent of the will, and the 
practices of Wordsworth ; but there is also a radical 
difference. The chief difference is that according 
to Schopenhauer the will creates ideas, while 
according to Wordsworth the will causes the mind 
to strike a proper attitude toward the powers that 
lie without. It is most likely true that the will 
cannot create ideas of its own accord and that 
Schopenhauer's philosophy is futile. But in Words- 
worth the mind, by means of the will, recalls old 
ideas and absorbs new ones, and selects and retains 
the best. And the chief function of these ideas is 
to nourish the passions ; so that through the chan- 
nel of ideas the will and the passions constantly 
re-enforce each other. And thus the will is saved 
from becoming barren and unproductive as in 
Schopenhauer, and the passions are saved from the 
excesses so common among the mystics. 

But when the will does its work intensely and 
passionately, then, by the stress of feeling, the 
experience is carried along through the different 
mystic stages, and it becomes more and more sub- 
jective and intuitive, more and more inexplicable, 



140 WORDSWORTH 

"the clearest, the surest of the surest"^ states of 
mind, "utterly beyond words." And, like chemicals 
that will act and form new combinations after a 
certain intensity of heat has been reached, so the 
will and the passions, counteracting and re- 
enforcing each other, both strongly and highly- 
wrought, beat out new combinations of highi 
character. This is the groundwork of Wordsworth's 
mystical synthesis, and it is solid groundwork — as 
solid and enduring as the heart of man itself. Born 
out of a time of revolution which stirred the vital 
energies and deepest personal convictions of men^ 
it yet bears the stamp of an original and masterful 
mind. It is a truth arrived at not by the calculating 
and analytical methods of a philosopher, but by the 
demands of an intuitive and sensitive nature charged 
with volitional and moral earnestness. It is no 
doubt wrong to call this a system of philosophy — 
it is rather a method of practice in the fundamental 
terms of human life. It is when Wordsworth is 
dealing with this original stuff of human nature 
that he rises above the accidental influences of his 
times and identifies himself powerfully with those 
forces in men that are permanent and enduring,. 

Their 'passions and their feelings, chiefly those 
Essential and eternal in the heart. 



MYSTICISM 141 

It is here that his utterances, in the words of 
Lowell, "have the bare sincerity, the absolute ab- 
straction from time and place, the immunity from 
decay, that belong to the grand simplicities of the 
Bible." 



CHAPTER VII 

MYSTICISM: ITS ARTISTIC VALUE 

Wordsworth always and primarily had before*, 
him the purpose of writing- poetry about man, 
nature, and childhood, however completely that 
purpose may have been obscured at times by social, 
political, or metaphysical interests. The poetry, 
to be sure, was to be philosophical poetry. It 
was to deal with new and original kinds of matter. 
It was to reform the tastes of readers and was to 
create a special taste for itself. It was to be an 
enduring kind of poetry and was to teach mankind 
enduring lessons. And. with these distracting- 
interests, the only reason it proved to be genuine 
poetry is that Wordsworth was at bottom a genuine 
artist. We have seen that he, for the most part, 
renounced the purely mystical, that he dispensed 
with the pleasure of building charming abstractions 
through the concrete images of the outer world, 
and from seeinsf "into the life of thinsfs." We shall 



MYSTICISM 143 

now see that he renounced the pleasure of the pure 
mystic because of artistic purposes, because his 
deepest impulse of life was the artistic impulse. 
"Faith," says E. Recejac, "identifies mind with its 
object in a way that artistic reflection can never 
do. ^^^hen we reflect we find that we get the 
feeling of love, joy, being, from within, and then 
we picture them as belonging to all sorts of things : 
but in the mystic state, the consciousness and the 
world meet directly in a world that transcends them 
both — in God who at once contains them and 
carries the sense of their affinities to the highest 
point. It is this meeting of the inner life of the 
spirit and the outer life which leaves behind every 
aesthetic effect.'' In the purely mystic conscious- 
ness, then, the inner and outer life meet in such 
close affinity that the artist, who must work in 
concrete imagery, pictures, colors, etc., in order to 
be effective, cannot find expression for the purely 
mystical experience. The pure mystic may indeed 
be able to "see into the life of things," as he says, 
but it does not help the artist, for he has no way 
of representing what he sees, and, as has just been 
said, representation is essential to the artist. 

Wordsworth, then, gave up for the most part 
the mighty charm of abstraction because he chose 
to be a poet primarily and not a mystic. But for 



144 WORDSWORTH 

this very same reason, namely, that he chose to 
be a poet, Wordsworth carried the mystic experi- 
ence, by the intensity of will and passion, to as near 
the vanishing- point of the senses as possible. In 
the preceding chapter we have seen that, within 
certain important limitations, the mystical synthesis 
of Wordsworth possessed practical and ethical 
validity. But in the last analysis it will be seen 
that the chief function of childhood memories, sense 
perceptions,' and the moral idea taken together (as 
we have already seen in the case of childhood 
memories taken separately), is to furnish material 
for purely artistic purposes. "Every thing good," 
says Emerson, "is on the highway. The middle 
region of our being is the temperate zone. We 
may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure 
geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of 
sensation. Between these extremes is the equator 
of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry. . . . The 
mid-world is the best." In this region of the 
equator of life, however, Wordsworth kept along 
the very highest zone ; and this is the prime 
necessity for all great poetry. Volition and high 
passion are not only the means by which character 
is beaten into shape, but they are essential to the 
production of great and enduring poetry. 

Poetry may deal with common things and the 



MYSTICISM 145 

common affairs of life, but it must deal with them 
more intensely than their commonness would sug- 
gest. Shakespeare, to use a familiar example, could 
deal with the common affairs of English life, but 
his great characters are filled with the mystery of 
power and with the intensity of high passion. 
Macbeth feels his heart knocking at his ribs and 
clutches at air-drawn daggers in his delirium. 
Othello is wrought upon by green-eyed jealousy 
until he is thrown into a trance. Hamlet is familiar 
with states of rapturous ecstasy. Lear, driven into 
the storm by the heinous wickedness of his daugh- 
ters, is stirred to mountain peaks of passion. We 
do not call these experiences mystical because so 
many other elements — elements of mind derange- 
ment, which is permissible in drama, elements of 
acting and dramatic effects, etc. — enter into them. 
But they have essentially the same source with the 
mystical experiences. Wordsworth believed the 
truth could be found in the commonest things right 
before one's eyes. But the penetration, the vision 
necessary to discover the truth there really created 
new values for them. Wordsworth wrote poems 
about common objects, but the poems do not 
especially have the element of commonality in them. 
His poems about children are not for children ; 
they are for mature minds. His poems about 

10 



146 WORDSWORTH 

peasants are not to be fully appreciated by peasants. 
The intensity of treatment removes the poems a 
great distance from the objects treated. The 
intensity of treatment gave little chance for 
ornamental display. It made the language of his 
poetry as simple as that of common people, but 
of a far different quality than that of common 
people. Wordsworth found when the holy passion 
was stirring that simple language would best 
express his feelings, just as Lady Macbeth, in 
the night walk scene, when she was charged with 
the greatest possible intensity, found (that is, the 
poet found for her,) simple language best suited 
to her purpose. To produce the greatest poetry, 
then, with common subjects, the poet must use 
power and intensity, and must express himself in 
the simplest language. 

The chief question with Wordsworth, however, 
was how to carry this mystic and poetic rapture to 
the highest point without losing control of it and 
without losing the vitality of concrete representa- 
tion. Shakespeare's art was to create a storm of 
passions and then ride successfully on the waves. 
Wordsworth's art was to create deep undercurrent 
stirrings of the water, but to retain a perfect calm 
on the surface. If Shakespeare's art was greater, 
Wordsworth's was perhaps more difficult. One 



P MYSTICISM 147 

essential aid in carrying the mystic intensity to a 
high point without going beyond the power of 
poetic representation, is to deal with primary and 
fundamental passions of human nature. The simple 
and most permanent passions of the heart are 
capable of being stretched farthest before breaking. 
Like the physical heart, they are so deeply in- 
wrought into the very structure of our being, that 
they continue beating faithfully as long as life 
lasts : 

There is comfort in the strength of love ; 
'Twill make a thing endurable, which else 
Would overstrain the brain or break the heart.. 

In the "Afiiictions of Margaret," the subdued self- 
control of the character is matched only by the 
intensity of her feelings. The surface is calm, but 
there are stirrings to depths unfathomable : 

Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan,. 
Maimed, mangled by inhuman men ; 
Or thou upon a desert thrown 
Inheritest the lion's den ; 
Or hast been summoned to the deep, 
Thou, thou and all thy mates, to keep 
An incommunicable sleep. 

I look for ghosts ; but none will force 
Their way to me ; 'tis falsely said 
That there was ever intercourse 
Between the living and the dead ; 



148 WORDSWORTH 

For, surely, then I should have signt 
Of him I wait for day and night, 
With love and longings infinite. 

My apprehensions come in crowds ; 
I dread the rustling of the grass ; 
The very shadows of the clouds 
Have power to shake me as they pass ; 
I question things and do not find 
One that will answer to my mind : 
And all the world appears unkind. 

Swinburne has compared this poem to Tennyson's 
"Rizpah," much to the advantage of the latter. No 
doubt "Rizpah" is in some respects the superior 
poem, but from the standpoint from which we are 
discussing poetry now, Tennyson's poem is quite 
inferior to Wordsworth's. Take the following three 
stanzas which hold practically the same relation 
to the poem as a whole as do the three stanzas we 
have quoted from "The Afflictions of Margaret" 
to that poem as a whole : 

Then since I couldn't but hear that cry of my boy that was 

dead, 
They seized me and shut me up : they fasten'd me down on 

my bed. 
■"Mother, O Mother !"— he call'd in the dark to me year 

after year — 
They beat me for that, they beat me — you know that I 

couldn't but hear ; 



MYSTICISM 149 

And then at the last they found I had grown so stupid and 

still, 
They let me abroad again — but the creatures had worked 

their will. 

Flesh of my flesh was gone, but bone of my bone was left — 
I stole them all from the lawyers — and you, will you call it 

a theft?— 
My baby, the bones that had suck'd me, the bones that had 

laughed and had cried — 
Theirs? Oh, no! they are mine — not theirs — they have 

moved in my side. 

Do' you think I was scared by the bones? I kiss'd 'em, I 

buried 'em all^ 
I can't dig deep, I am old— in the night by the churchyard 

wall. 
My Willy 'ill rise up whole when the trumpet of judgment 

'ill sound, 
But I charge you never to say that I laid him in holy ground. 

There is complete abandonment in this character^ 
lack of reserve and of quiet self-possession. There 
is much excitement and even intensity in the poem,, 
but it is comparatively more objective and on the 
surface. There is not the firm grasp on the vital 
and the deeply elemental, not the unfathomable 
depths nor the subdued self-control as in the 
"Afflictions of Margaret." 

Another essential aid in carrying the mystic 
intensity and rapture to a high point without 



150 WORDSWORTH 

passing into abstraction, was the investiture of the 
material universe with spirituality and movement. 
Everything for him, Wordsworth says in the 
Prelude, "respired with inward meaning." Every- 
thing was transfused with a living spirit. All the 
objects of nature, great and small, remote and near 
— rocks and flowers and birds and trees, the very 
air we breathe, the very earth upon which we tread, 
the pageantry of earth and sea and sky, "the broad 
ocean and the azure heavens spangled with kindred 
multitude of stars" — all are, before our very eyes, 
transfused by the "blessed power that rolls about, 
below, above." We are made to feel that we our- 
selves are "rolled round in earth's diurnal course, 
with rocks, and stones, and trees." Charged with 
mystical intensity, but void of mystical excess, 
Wordsworth intensifies, with naturalness and spon- 
taneity, the world round about us until it becomes 
a new world for us. He makes it a transfusing and. 
animating presence that mingles with our works 
and pours its living spirit about us. This con- 
ception gives suppleness and mobility to the 
imagination and keeps it whole. And the mystic 
intensity of it is thereby carried to a high point 
without losing the vitality of concreteness. 

With an unusual hold on fundamental passions 
of hardy human characters and with attributin 



MYSTICISM 151 

movement and moral power to the sense world in 
which we live, Wordsworth succeeded in carrying 
mystic intensity to its utmost in the realm of 
poetry. We have seen in an earlier chapter that 
the memories of childhood, as materials for artistic 
use, have absolute validity. And now we can see 
that the synthesis of those memories with the 
physical world and moral power has the same 
artistic validity. 

It has validity because with it Wordsworth 
remains close to actualit}^ and yet creates new and 
ideal values. The highest function of the poet is 
creation, of "widening nature without going beyond 
it," of enlarging the sphere of life and freedom. 
We demand from the poet enough contact with 
the actual to make us sure we are on solid ground. 
W'Q demand also new idealizations that are self- 
supporting, and that seem to us reasonable and 
worth while. Wordsworth at one and the same 
moment gives us both solid substance and intense 
idealizations. 

The power of the mind by which this unity of 
ideality and actuality is effected is penetration, or 
vision. The measure of the mind's power is the 
measure of the tension we feel resulting from the 
attempt to express the universal in the particular, 
the ideal in the actual. The whole history of 



152 WORDSWORTH 

Wordsworth's literary life may be summed up as 
a constant and persistent endeavor to substitute 
this power of vision for imagination as ordinarily 
conceived, to put himself at once at the center of 
nature and at the center of his own life, and to 
make those centers, not imaginatively but actually, 
identical. To attain this end completely, however, 
is an impossibility forever, for it is always by a 
leap of the imagination that the final identity is 
made. Perhaps in the "Ode to Duty" more nearly 
than anywhere else, Wordsworth attained to this 
identity by pure vision, as, for example, in the 
following eight lines where he draws the power of 
the inner and personal life into identity with the 
"Stern Law Giver" of the outer world : 

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds 
And fragrance in thy footing treads ; 
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; 
And the most ancient heavens, through thee are fresh 
and strong. 

To humbler functions, awful Power ! 
I call thee : I myself commend 
Unto thy guidance from this hour; 
Oh, let my weakness have an end ! 

But even in these lines the transition from the 
thought in the first four to that in the last four is 



MYSTICISM 153 

made by a leap of the imagination. Thus the very 
last step in the attempt at any such identity is an 
imaginative step, and the result obtained is the 
result almost, but not wholly, of pure vision. But 
it is precisely by such an artistic aim (even though 
it is not ideally attainable) and by such a mystical 
conception of life and nature that Wordsworth has 
won the distinction of depending more than any 
other poet upon the power of unaided vision. 

His method as the result of his artistic aim was 
productive of many artistic effects that are charac- 
teristically Wordsworthian. It led him, for example, 
to renounce the conventional language of the poets, 
to brand all extrinsic ornament as unnecessary and 
insincere, and to depend absolutely upon the con- 
creteness of the thing he was talking about for 
poetic representation. He considered that every 
object, however minute, was itself sufificient for the 
stimulation of the senses. But by his intense 
penetration upon minute objects of life and nature 
he steeped those objects with a splendor not really 
their own. For extrinsic ornamentation commonly 
used by other poets he substituted visions of 
universal nature and the power of his own spirit. 
In a sonnet, for example, in which he addresses a 
brook he has these words : 



154 WORDSWORTH 

I would not do 
Like Grecian Artists, give thee human cheeks, 
Channels for tears ; no Naiad should'st thou be — 
Have neither limbs, feet, feathers, joints nor hairs : 
It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee 
With purer robes than those of flesh and blood, 
And hath bestowed on thee a safer good; 
Unwearied joy, and life without its cares. 

The meadow-flower and the forest-tree are made to 
possess individual life and universal freedom : 

How does the meadow-flower its bloom unfold? 
Because the lonely little flower is free 
Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold ; 
And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree 
Comes not by casting in a formal mould. 
But from its otun divine vitality. 

"Lives there a man?" Wordsworth asks in the 
poem "To the Lady Fleming" : 

Who never caught a noon-tide dream 
From murmur of a running stream ; 
Could strip, for aught the prospect yields 
To him, their verdure from the fields ; 
And take the radiance from the clouds 
In which the sun his setting shrouds? 

In like manner the sweet and simple "Highland 
Girl" is identified with the spirit of her sur- 
roundings : 



J 



MYSTICISM 155 

Nor am I loth, though pleased at heart, 

Sweet Highland Girl! from thee to part: 

For I, methinks, till I grow old. 

As fair before me shall behold, 

As I do now, the cabin small, 

The lake, the bay, the waterfall ; 

And Thee, the Spirit of them all ! 

In one of the "Lucy" poems he makes the Spirit 
of Nature say of Lucy : 

"Myself will to my darling be 

Both law and impulse : and with me 

The Girl, in rock and plain. 
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 
Shall feel an overseeing power 

To kindle or restrain. 

"She shall be sportive as the fawn 
That wild with glee across the lawn 

Or up the mountain springs ; 
And her's shall be the breathing balm, 
And her's the silence and the calm 

Of mute insensate things. 

"The floating clouds their state shall lend 
To her; for her the willow bend; 

Nor shall she fail to see 
Even in the motions of the Storm 
Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form 

By silent sympathy. 



iS6 WORDSWORTH 

"The stars of midnight shall be dear 
To her; and she shall lean her ear 

In many a secret place 
Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
And beauty born of murmuring sound 

Shall pass into her face." 

The brook, the flower, the tree, the child — small 
and common objects indeed — are thus seen simply 
but also intensely by the poet. And as a result of 
that simple and intense penetration the poet reflects 
in these objects visions of universal nature and the 
power of his own spirit. To particularize from the 
last of the illustrations just given, the child seen 
thus simply and intensely, suggests, not by way 
of comparison, but by means of the poet's direct 
seeing, pictorial visions of floating clouds, bending 
willows, moving storms, midnight stars and dancing 
rivulets that subtly mold her life into shape ; and 
the whole poem similarly suggests that the divine 
spirit of the poet himself interpenetrates that subtle 
power of nature which serves as law and impulse 
to kindle or restrain the child and which lends balm 
and grace and beauty to her spirit. This artistic 
method and aim, together with his firm grasp upon 
fundamental passions of hardy human characters 
and with his attributing movement and moral power 
to the sense world in which we live, makes Words- 



MYSTICISM IS7 

Avortli successful not only in carrying mystic inten- 
sity to its utmost in poetry but in giving us in his 
own poetry solid substance and actuality on the 
one hand, and, on the other, intense and highly 
wrought idealizations. 

That Wordsworth always aims to produce 
idealizations he seems to deny in his "Elegiac 
Stanzas" on the death of his brother John. This 
denial, however, is made on the grounds of mys- 
ticism rather than on the grounds of poetry. It 
is due no doubt to \\'ordsworth's mystic earnest- 
ness in taking the world he has half-created as the 
world of absolute reality. We have seen, however, 
that the light of the pure mystic's faith is too 
intense for the attainment of artistic and poetic 
effects, and it is best to be somewhat skeptical, 
from the standpoint of the poet's art, after a certain 
point of intensity has been reached. Let us first 
get the poem itself before our minds. The poem 
was suggested by a picture of Peele Castle in a 
storm. The poet begins : 

I was thy neighbor once, thou rugged Pile ! 
Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee : 
I saw thee every day and all the while 
Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea. 

After telling in the next two stanzas "how perfect 
was the calm," he continues: 



158 WORDSWORTH 

Ah ! then if mine had been the Painter's hand 
To express what then I saw ; and add the gleam, 
The light that never was, on sea or land, 
The consecration, and the Poet's dream; 

I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile, 
Amid a world how different from this ! 
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile ;. 
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss. 

The gleam of light that was to be added, it may- 
be explained, was to be "borrowed from the youth- 
ful poet's dream." After telling how, in the fond 
illusion of his heart, he would have painted the 
picture, he says : 

So once it would have been — 'tis so no more ; 
I have submitted to a new control : 
A power is gone, which nothing can restore; 
A deep distress hath humanized my Soul. 

And in the conclusion : 

Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone, 
Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind! 
Such happiness, wherever it be known. 
Is to be pitied ; for 'tis surely blind. 

But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer. 
And frequent sights of what is to be borne ! 
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here — 
Not without hope we suft'er and we mourn. 

The point in the poem to seize is that from hence- 
forth to attain to happiness the poet means to see 



MYSTICISM 159 

reality only, "frequent sights of what is to be 
borne." Since he has submitted to a new control, 
he means to paint pictures not as they might be, 
but as they are in reality. He means to dispense 
with the poet's dream, and thereby, it is implied, 
with the power of idealization. 

And this conception is in harmony with his 
definition of imagination in the Fourteenth Book 
of the Prelude which was written about the same 
time as the "Elegiac Stanzas." There he explains 
that imagination, in truth. 

Is but another name for absolute power 
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind. 
And Reason in her most exalted mood. 

And what he means by "Reason in her most exalted 
mood," it must be remembered, is passion. This 
he explains in the Fifth Book of the Prelude, where 
he speaks of 

Adamantine holds of truth 
By reason built, or passion, which itself 
Is highest reason in a soul sublime. 

We have, then, in volition which is "absolute 
power" and an adamantine hold on the truth, in 
passion which "itself is highest reason," and in 
insight which is sensitive and sympathetic vision — 
in these we have the ingredients of the imagination. 
And this, it may be added, is, for all practical 



i6o WORDSWORTH 

purposes, an accurate description of the conscious 
elements of Wordsworth's imagination. And we 
have noted in an earlier chapter, it is peculiarly- 
true of Wordsworth that his imagination is the 
product of the elemental powers of volition, passion, 
and sensitiveness. 

The chief point of interest for us here, however, 
is that this conception of the imagination has its 
limitations, that when the poet attempts to sub- 
stitute what he feels to be the facts of absolute 
reality for imagination he goes beyond the limits 
of the power of poetic representation. It is all 
very well for a mystic who sees the absolute facts 
of reality in his symbols or even in a deep distress 
that has humanized his soul, to disparage the poet's 
imagination that is "housed in a dream'' and that 
loves to build an ideal castle 

Beside a sea that could not cease to smile; 

On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss. 

But the mystic's sense of absolute reality, carried 
to its logical sequence, places the poet's art in a 
false light. For, in his substitution of the supposed 
facts of absolute reality for imagination, he en- 
croaches upon and limits the poet's power of 
idealization and creation. The poet can never avoid 
being a creator, for that is the highest function. 
He is no doubt to try to see things as they are, 



MYSTICISM i6i 

but it is equally important that he should create 
new values for those things, and the mystic's ideal 
of absolute reality is an impossibility in a world 
where creation is going on. Are not the "Elegiac 
Stanzas" themselves, from the artistic standpoint, 
a refutation of the mystic's theory? Let us place 
side by side two stanzas from the poem, one from 
the earlier part, in which he tells how he once 
would have painted the picture, and one from the 
latter part, where the picture is given in reality; 

A Picture had it been of lasting ease, 
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife ; 
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze, 
Or merely silent Nature's breathing life. 

And this huge Castle standing here sublime, 

I love to see the look with which it braves, 

Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time, 

The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves. 

Are not both of these stanzas creations? Do thev 
not both have the added gleam, the ""consecration 
and the poet's dream"? And does not the first 
possess as much reality as the latter, and is it not 
just as legitimate as a poetic creation? Words- 
worth's poetic art defies his mystic theory; and 
though in theory he was often a pure mystic, in 
practice he was a genuine creative artist. The 
poet in him prevailed over the mystic. But the 



i62 WORDSWORTH 

conflict and the renunciations which it brought 
with it were boundlessly fruitful. For out of the 
struggle between the mystic, who by the intensity 
of pure vision would have his "eye on his object" 
and would see "into the life of things," and the 
poet, who, bound by his art, must find words and 
concrete imagery in which to express his thoughts, 
there was born a synthesis of the actual and the 
ideal, of solid substance and idealization, that led 
the poet a long way toward permanent and funda- 
mental truths of human nature ; a long way toward, 
yet somewhat on the hither side, of absolute truth 
and absolute reality. 

In the Second Book of the Prelude, which was 
written considerably earlier than the Fourteenth 
and the "Elegiac Stanzas," Wordsworth, in tracing 
the growth of his poetic mind, gives a less mystical 
and a more just account of the poet's idealizing 
power : 

An auxiliary light 
Came from my mind, which on the setting sun 
Bestowed new splendor : the melodious birds, 
The fluttering breezes, fountains that run on 
Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed 
A like dominion, and the midnight storm 
Grew darker in the presence of my eye : 
Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence, 
And hence my transport. 



MVSriCISM 163 

Here the eye is on the object and it also idealizes 
the object. This is in accordance with the facts 
of realistic depiction and poetic creation, together 
with the power of intensifying by mystical vision. 
To give exhaustive illustrations of this artistic 
principle would be to write down most of the poetry 
that is truly characteristic of Wordsworth. But 
perhaps no better short and single example can be 
given than one of the "Lucy" poems. Here the 
deepest heart passion is stirred to the depths, and 
the movement of the whole universe intensely 
idealized. But after many readings of the poem, 
one is convinced of the utter inadequacy of any 
words to describe its mystic intensity : 

A slumber did my spirit seal ; 

I had no human fears ; 

She seemed a thing that could not feel 

The touch of earthly years. 

No motion has she now, no force; 
She neither hears nor sees ; 
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, 
With rocks, and stones, and trees. 



CHAPTER VIII 



PHILOSOPHY: ITS LIMITATIONS 



In the discussion of the memories of child- 
hood and of mysticism in the preceding pages, 
philosophic considerations tended to press in at 
every turn, but the main philosophic issue has 
been evaded until now. It has already been said, 
however, that Wordsworth's doctrine of childhoo 
memories did not possess the dignity of 
philosophic system, but rather the simplicity o: 
a psychological method, and that his mystica 
synthesis of childhood memories, sense perceptio 
and a moral idea, based on the union of self-contro 
and passion, however closely bound up with philos- 
ophy, could hardly attain to the dignity of a 
philosophical system of thought. But Wordsworth 
himself believed that "poetry is the breath and 
finer spirit of all knowledge : the impassioned 
expression which is in the countenance of all 
science," and his highest ambition was to write 



I 



PHILOSOPHY ids 

what he called a "philosophic song of truth." 

Then a wish, 
My last and favorite aspiration, mounts 
With yearning toward some philosophic song 
Of Truth that cherishes our daily life ; 
With meditations passionate from deep 
Recesses in man's heart, immortal verse 
Thoughtfully fitted to the Orphean lyre. 

Was his ambition realized? How far and in what 
sense is his poetry philosophic, and how far and 
in what sense is he a philosopher? 

Tn the various critical writings on Wordsworth 
there is perhaps more confusion in the answers to 
these questions than on any other question relating 
to Wordsworth. Leslie Stephen, for example, says 
that Wordsworth is "a true philosopher. His 
poetry wears well because it gives solid substance. 
He is a prophet and a moralist as well as a mere 
singer. His ethical system in particular is as 
distinctive and capable of systematic exposition as 
that of Butler. By endeavoring to state it in plain 
prose, we shall see how the poetical power implies 
a sensitiveness to ideas, which, when extracted 
from the symbolical embodiment, fall spontaneously 
into a scientific system of thought." In contrast 
to this, Morley says: "His theology and his ethics, 
and his so-called Plantonical metaphysics, have a.s 



i66 WORDSWORTH 

little to do with the power of his poetry over us, 
as the imputed Arianism or any other aspect of 
the theology of 'Paradise Lost' has to do with the 
strength and the sublimity of Milton, and his claim 
to a high perpetual place in the hearts of men. 
It is best to be entirely skeptical as to the existence 
of system and ordered philosophy in Wordsworth." 
Again, Church says: "Wordsworth was, first and 
foremost, a philosophical thinker ; a man whose 
intention and purpose of life it was to think out 
for himself, faithfully and seriously, the questions 
concerning 'Man and Nature and Human Life' ;" 
and Stopford Brooke finds ''ordered thought" and 
a personal theology in Wordsworth, and thinks him 
the greatest philosopher of the century. On the 
contrary, Matthew Arnold says rather sharply: 
"We must be on our guard against the Words- 
worthians, if we would secure for Wordsworth his 
due rank as a poet. The Wordsworthians are apt 
to praise him for the wrong things, and to lay far 
too much stress on what they call his philosophy — 
so far, at least, as it may put on the form and 
habit of a 'scientific system of thought,' and the 
more that it puts them on — is the illusion. Perhaps 
we shall one day learn to make this proposition 
general, and to say : Poetry is the reality, philosophy 
is the illusion. But in Wordsworth's case, at any 



PHILOSOPHY 167 

rate, we cannot do him justice until we dismiss 
his formal philosophy," and Swinburne sanctions 
with all his heart this particular statement of 
Arnold. 

Of course, some of these statements have been 
called out by some of the others. Arnold, for 
example must have had Leslie Stephen's passage 
in mind when he wrote the above. So that in most 
of the cases some allowance must be made for 
personal warmth in the controversy; but that does 
not eradicate the differences. Is it that these 
eminent critics use their terms with different mean- 
ings? But how can the word "system" be mistaken 
in its meaning? Allowing for possible difference 
in the use of terms, there still remains a deep 
underlying difference in their views of poetry and 
philosophy and in their approach to the problems 
of life. In our approach to the subject, then, it 
will be necessary, first of all, to define our terms 
somewhat, and to discuss briefly and in very general 
terms the relation between philosophy and poetry. 
Though poetry has glories all its own and 
independent of philosophy, it will not be necessary 
to discuss them here. On the contrary, the dis- 
cussion shall be confined to the question as to what 
poetry can do in the field of philosophy. 

Many literary critics have insisted upon certain 



i68 WORDSWORTH 

distinctions between poetry and science. They 
have pointed out, that, while poetry and science 
frequently make use of the same objective materials 
— flowers, trees, birds, animals, land, sea, oceans, 
stars, etc. — they have distinctly different purposes 
in view and proceed by widely different methods: 
so that either one can never be outgrown or super- 
seded by the other. Similar distinctions have been 
made between poetry and philosophy ; however, 
not with the same emphasis, since the two are more 
nearly alike in purpose and in method. It must 
undoubtedly be admitted that the fields of poetry 
and philosophy frequently overlap each other, but 
this admission should not blind us to the fact that 
there still remain fundamental and radical differ-; * 
ences between the two. Although there is much 
philosophy in Hamlet or in the Prelude one 
instinctively feels that even here he is in a 
different world than when he reads Kant or 
Aristotle. The difference lies not so much in the 
materials that are dealt with as in the temper and 
the attitude of mind of the authors in their approach 
to their respective subjects;. The most general 
formula for this difference is, that, while they both 
may apprehend the same world of material and 
immaterial objects, the poet apprehends them 
intuitively and emotionally through the imagination. 



PHILOSOPHY 169 

and the philosopher intellectually through con- 
templation. And the poet's way of apprehending 
his objects carries two limitations with it. First, 
he can only approach general and abstract truth 
by way of and through the concrete ; and, secondly, 
his method of procedure must be almost wholly 
synthetic, scarcely at all analytic. Let us take 
these points up separately and in detail. 

I. In one sense philosophy has a wider range 
than poetry. Philosophy can and does deal directly 
with things in the abstract. This is especially 
fitting to analytical processes and to contemplation. 
Poetry, on the other hand, cannot deal directly with 
the abstract. When it attempts to deal directly 
with the abstract it loses its vitality, from the 
simple fact that its moving power is passion and 
its principal forming agency is the imagination, 
and passion and imagination cannot long sustain 
themselves in the barren fields of abstraction. 
Poetry, limited as it is to deal mainly with the 
concrete, is fully rewarded for the price it pays 
for its limitations. It avoids barrenness, and 
remains close to life — two things w;hich cannot 
always be said of philosophy. 

How, then, does it happen that poetry deals 
with philosophical matters at all? It deals with 
them only indirectly and by implication. The con- 



170 WORDSWORTH 

Crete lends itself to this method quite readily. When 
Wordsworth says : 

My heart leaps up when I behold 

A rainbow in the sky : 
So was it when my life began ; 
So is it now I am a man ; 
So shall it be when I grow old, 

Or let me die ! — 

he implies much more than is explicitly stated. In 
the third, fourth and fifth lines he implies that a 
man's life should have continuity throughout, and 
should be in harmony with itself. He also implies 
the agency by which this continuity and harmony 
is to be effected. Had Wordsworth not written 
any more of this poem than the above lines, we 
could, with considerable certainty, have decided 
that the agency by which this harmony and con- 
tinuity are to be effected is suggested in the first 
two lines. The implications of these lines are that 
not merely does his heart leap up at the sight of 
the rainbow (for why should he especially single 
out the rainbow from other beautiful objects?), but 
that his heart is affected likewise by all beautiful 
objects of the external world. The further im- 
plication is that all hearts that are as sensitive and 
as responsive to the beauty of external objects 
as is the poet's will in the same manner be power- 



PHILOSOPHY \7i 

fully affected, and their lives, as a result, will 
possess continuity and harmony. To be sure, in 
the lines that follow — 

The Child is father of the Man; 
And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety — 

the poet, with considerable more directness, gives 
expression to these generalizations. Still they are 
stated in the concrete, and their implications cer- 
tainly carry the mind far beyond the mere statement 
of a wish. 

It does not follow, however, that when one 
traces out these philosophic implications to their 
end that he has arrived at the best and essential 
things in the poem. A child can read this poem 
and enjoy the essential pleasure which the poem 
ought to produce, without being aware of its 
philosophic implications. He can enjoy the color, 
the concrete pictures, the mood created by these 
pictures, and the subtle beauty that slips in un- 
consciously from every side ; and can realize that 
the vague feelings he has had about a rainbow have 
been expressed for him. A number of very young 
students have been known who selected this poem 
as their favorite, from a number of much simpler 
poems, and who, when questioned, showed they 
had no clear understanding of its philosophical 



1/2 WORDSWORTH 

bearing. Perhaps the cause of their choice lay^ 
in the strangely stirring and peculiarly heightening 
effect of the first two lines. Is it not true, after 
all, that the simplicity and the simple beauty which 
commends itself directly to the affections of the 
young student, and which produces that strangely 
stirring and peculiarly heightening effect on the 
minds of us all are the chief sources of the most 
important poetic excellencies? And if a man pro- 
fesses that he has actually outgrown the need of 
feeling such effects, is he not therefore the less 
wise? On the other hand, if the young student is 
given a simple exposition of the philosophic im- 
plications of the poem, his love for the poem is 
not destroyed, but is deepened. In the best poetry 
the philosophic implications are merely adjuncts 
and concomitants to the poetry itself. In this 
particular poem, they are unique adjuncts and 
natural concomitants, and the fullest appreciation 
of the poem demands an understanding of its 
philosophy as well as the appreciation of its simpler 
power and beauty. 

It is not necessary to conclude that since such 
a poem as "My Heart Leaps Up" contains by 
implication a unique and profound philosophy that 
all other equally good poems must likewise point 
toward some far-reaching principle of philosophic 



PHILOSOPHY 173 

truth. It would be difficult, for example, to 
determine the underlying philosophy of the "Rime 
of the Ancient Mariner" ; and, if one should under- 
take the task, the result would be so shadowy that 
he would hardly be rewarded for his pains. Poems 
can be placed on a scale, beginning with those 
whose philosophic implications are rather vague 
or altogether wanting, and ending with those whose 
philosophic implications are evident and pro- 
nounced. Certainly the "Rime of the Ancient 
Mariner" would be placed near one end of the 
scale, and undoubtedly "My Heart Leaps Up" and 
many another poem of Wordsworth would be 
placed near the other end of the scale. Perhaps 
Gray's "Elegy" would be placed somewhere near 
the middle, since it contains some generalized truth, 
but in the main simply recites the "short and simple 
annals of the poor." The scale itself and the poems 
ranged upon it would not determine the chief merits 
of the poems. It would merely indicate how the 
fields of poetry and philosophy overlap each other, 
and how philosophy blends itself into poetry in all 
sorts of varying shades and degrees. 

Furthermore, if a poet deliberately undertakes 
to write philosophical poems, he does not neces- 
sarily commit himself to make his different poems 
point toward- the same ethical or philosophical 



174 WORDSWORTH 



1 



system of thought. This is an important point in 
our consideration of Wordsworth. Truth, as it 
appeals to our intellect, is so vast and manysided 
that it can never be reduced to a single system in 
any absolute sense. And even though it were 
capable of being systematized, poetry would cer- 
tainly not be the instrument by which such sys- 
tematization were to be accomplished. No one can 
write good poetry for any length of time with his 
eye primarily upon some particular ethical or 
philosophical system of thought. His poetry will 
lose that spontaneity, vitality and concreteness 
without which no good poetry can exist. Besides, 
such poems evidently would be written with a 
bias ; and disinterestedness is a quality we insist 
on in the best poetry. The true poet allows the 
power of his passion and his selective imagination 
to fashion the concrete material into such form 
that is most natural and most consistent with that 
material ; and thus the philosophic implications of 
the poem will be determined mainly by the 
intuitions, passion, and imagination of the poet, 
together with the particular concrete material with 
which he deals. For this reason each new poem 
may point toward a different philosophical truth 
from its predecessor, and the implications of dif- 
ferent poems by the same author may, therefore^ 



PHILOSOPHY 175 

not be reducable to the same system of ethical or 
philosophical thought. 

The truth is that it is in a poem rather than 
in a poet that we should look for consistent prin- 
ciples. A philosophical poem should be a self- 
supporting whole in its philosophy as well as in 
its artistic structure. It may be said with very little 
fear of contradiction that if a poet attempts to 
write a long poem and make it truly philosophical, 
he will, from the fact of his constant elTort to make 
its philosophy consistent with itself throvighout, 
lose a certain spontaneity and freedom that belong 
to the poet by right of his vocation. But whether 
a poem be long or short, there are no laws of art 
which compel its philosophy to be consistent with 
the philosophy of another poem, even though it be 
by the same author. As a work of art it must 
stand independently. It is for these reasons that 
it is impossible, for example, to reduce the poetry 
of Shakespeare to a system. Lovers of Wordsworth 
should therefore be reluctant to admit with Leslie 
Stephen that "his ethical system, in particular, is 
as distinctive and capable of systematic exposition 
as that of Butler." One wishes that the chief 
distinction between Wordsworth and Butler might 
be that Wordsworth's ethical system, in particular, 
might 770/ be as distinctive and capable of sys- 



T76 WORDSWORTH 

lematic exposition as that of Butler. At any rate, 
whatever philosophic implications the most charac- 
teristic poems of Wordsworth may have, it can 
hardly be said that these implications point toward 
some one definitely formulated principle of ethics 
or philosophy. They indicate rather an escape 
from a formulated creed. As far as these poems 
possess a philosophy, each possesses a distinct and 
unique philosophy of its own. The poet here under 
the sway of his imagination at white heat and the 
power of his passion molded these poems, not 
according to some preconceived system of ethics 
or philosophy, but according to the deep impulses 
of his own nature and according to the particular 
concrete materials of each particular poem. Let 
us look at these points more in detail and by 
illustration. 

The poet, according to this view, approaches a 
general truth intuitively and emotionally through 
the concrete. It is always through a flower, a star, 
a rock, an animal, a personal mood, a particular 
moral act, the serious act or the prank of a child, 
an individual character — always through some bit 
of concrete and detached experience or observation 
that the poet attains to his larger generalizations. 
In "My Heart Leaps Up" it was through the rain- 
bow that the poet was led first to think of an 



PHILOSOPHY 177 

earlier experience with it, then was led to push his 
generalization farther until he had arrived at the 
general truth that individual life should have con- 
tinuity and that such continuity could be eflfected 
by natural piety. 

Likewise in the poem "The Primrose of the 
Rock" a bit of concrete object attracts the poet's 
attention : 

A Rock there is whose homely front 

The passing traveller slights ; 

Yet there the glow-worms hang their lamps, 

Like stars, at various heights ; 

And one coy Primrose to that Rock 

The vernal breeze invites. 

In the next stanza the concrete description goes 
on, but in the very last lines a generalization is 
reached : 

What hideous warfare has been wages, 

What kingdoms overthrown, 

Since first I spied that Primrose tuft 

And marked it for my own; 

A lasting link in Nature's chain 

From highest heaven let down ! 

And this generalization is worked out fully and 
beautifully in the two following stanzas, and, as 
good poetry must have it, all in the concrete : 



178 WORDSWORTH 

The flowers still faithful to the stems, 

Their fellowship renew ; 

The stems are faithful to the root, 

That worketh out of view ; 

And to the rock the root adheres 

In every fibre true. 

Close, clings to earth the living rock, 
Though threatening still to fall ; 
The earth is constant to her sphere ; 
And God upholds them all : 
So blooms this lovely Plant, nor dreads 
Her annual funeral. 

Thus, starting from the little primrose, the poet 
pushes his generalization out, as it were, through 
the roots and the rock, out until the earth, "constan 
to her sphere," and God upholding them all are] 
included in his generalization. At this point the 
complete generalization that there is a law in the 
universe which binds the greatest and smalles 
things indissolubly together has been reached, and 
a natural division of the poem comes to a close. 
Thus the approach to the abstract has been made 
through the concrete. m 

The latter division of the poem deals with 
flowers and men in general. The moralizing and 
generalizing tendency is somewhat palpable and 
the poem here loses in spontaneity. Moreover, if 
one cared to engage in philosophical niceties, he 



t 



PHILOSOPHY 179 

would find that at bottom the philosophy of the lat- 
ter division of the poem is in contradiction to that 
of the former. The poet morally and intuitively 
takes the opposite position from his observations 
made in the first division. He faces the facts in 
the first and intuitively and moralizingly hopes the 
opposite in the latter. The poem is not a self- 
supporting- whole in its philosophy, but each 
division makes such a whole. 

This last consideration is only of secondary 
importance to the poet, but to the philosopher it 
is of prime importance. The philosopher seeks, 
first of all, a system of general truths into the 
scheme of Avhich all acts, objects and facts will 
naturally fall. But the concrete things of this 
universe are so various in their nature and so 
infinite in number that the philosopher has never 
yet found a system by which all facts can be 
satisfactorily explained. The poet generally is noi 
as ambitious as the philosopher to acquire a world- 
view, and he approaches the truth by an opposite 
method. He takes his concrete object, and if he 
is not satisfied with pure description or exposition, 
which he often is not, he will penetrate its inner 
meaning and see how much of universal law is 
reflected in this object. And the poem, if it is a 
poem, that comes out of it, will be a philosophic 



i8o WORDSWORTH 

poem. But his next bit of concrete matter will 
perhaps reflect some general aspect of universal 
truth different from the first, and the two poems j 
will not fall into quite the same system of I 
philosophy. % 

To be sure, these poems will be an expression I 
of the poet's personality, and the poet's personality I 
is a distinct entity. But a distinct and recognizable 
personality does not make a system of philosophy. 
This statement needs further elucidation. What- 
ever view we may hold about style — whether it is 
the man himself, or the economy of attention, or 
something else — it is certain that one of the great 
outstanding facts of history is that a great poet, 
more than a philosopher, impresses us with a 
unique, profound and universal personality. And 
whatever opprobrium may be attached to the word 
"system" — and there really should be none — the 
word in its highest and best sense (and that is 
the sense in which it is used in this discussion) is * 
peculiarly the thing for which a great philosopher 
stands. There are many philosophers who are 
partial poets, but let us think for a mon;ent of two 
men who are distinctively philosophers, men with , 
whom the exponents of philosophy are willing to J 
rest their case — Aristotle and Kant. When we call 
to mind the work of these men we see that in each 



PHILOSOPHY i8i 

case there was a powerfully critical and minute 
analysis of the possibility and meaning of human 
knowledge, and then the construction of a marvel- 
ous synthesis — a system, embracing in its ordered 
outlines the chief facts of human life. There was 
with each an analytic and synthetic grappling with 
the seeming disordered universe in which we live, 
that wins the profound respect and gratitude of all 
thinking men. Now, set over against this the work, 
say, of Shakespeare, and how very different it is I 
Yet a work a little more enduring, and, on the 
whole, a little more worth while, the literary critic 
must confess, than that of the philosopher. And 
the thing which the poet possesses to match the 
gigantic intellect of the philosopher is the power 
of a distinct and universal personality, however 
completely it may be hid behind the conventions of 
the poet's art — a personality, which, imaginatively 
unified, tremblingly emotional, vibrating as it were, 
in the whole essence of its being, goes out toward 
its object, polarizes and vitalizes it, produces a 
reflection of universal law and universal life in it — ■ 
a personality which, thus unified, can completely 
express itself in a single pregnant, sententious 
phrase or line, in the presence of the most common 
and simple situation in life — a personality which 
is sensitively open to every new experience, and 



/ 



i82 WORDSWORTH 

is therefore essentially a growing and creative 
personality. And it is for these reasons alone, if 
for no others, that the poet cannot with his artistic 
and intellectual furnishings engage in constructing 
a system of philosophy. 

By way of illustration we have now seen why 
a poem, which must always be an artistic whole, 
may with perfect consistency have by implication 
and through the concrete a philosophy at its base, 
and why the poet who may choose to write such 
poems may not have — and should not hav e if he_ 
would remain perfectly^ spontaneous, in touch with 
concrete life, truly disinterested and creative — a 
fixed and articulate system of philosophy. 

But is this last statement in accord with 
Wordsworth's experience and practice? Let us 
bring together the generalizations of three poems 
we have already analyzed — "My Heart Leaps Up," 
"To the Cuckoo," and "The Primrose of the Rock" 
(the division we have analyzed) — and see whether 
they will fall into a system. In "My Heart Leaps 
Up" we have seen that the general truth is that 
individual life should have continuity and that such 
continuity could be eflfected by natural piety. But 
this continuity is made by the poet to rest chiefly 
upon memory and sense, the memory of a sense 
perception. The child has an experience with 



PHILOSOPHY 183 

nature. His heart was made to leap up by the 
sight of a rainbow, and since it was a precious 
experience, let us retain it from day to day, or be 
willing to die if we fail. Continuity, then, based 
on the conserving power of the memory of natural 
objects is the more comprehensive statement of the 
general truth of this poem. Although in the poem 
"To a Cuckoo" the mind's method of procedure 
is very much the same as in "My Heart Leaps 
Up," yet the philosophic implications in the former 
point in an opposite direction. Here the outer 
^vorld is conceived as "an insubstantial faery place." 
Reality is subjective. The physical world is trans- 
cended. If there is reality in the outer world, it 
is spiritual reality, not physical — physical things 
are but appearances. On the other hand, in the 
"Primrose of the Rock" the outer world is con- 
ceived as a physical reality, as governed by an 
inexorable law — a law which binds the smallest 
things to the greatest. Now, how and on what 
philosophic grounds are these three general con- 
ceptions to be drawn into a single philosophic 
system of thought? In philosophic terms, the first 
would chiefly be recollection, the second trans- 
cendentalism, and the third determinism, and they 
naturally fall into different systems of thought. 
But suppose we add to these general truths 



i84 WORDSWORTH 

the general truths of "The Fountain," "Elegiac 
Stanzas," "Ode to Duty," and especially a number 
of the sonnets, and our systematization would 
become impracticable, if not impossible. 

Again, there are many poems of Wordsworth — 
and some of his best ones are included here — of 
which it can be said they belong to no system of 
philosophic thought whatever. Of the story of Mich- 
ael and that of Margaret, Professor Raleigh says : 
"It is wrong, indeed, to call these works stories ; 
they are all the very stuff of first-hand experience, 
and their reader lives through many more hours 
than they take in the telling," and for the same 
reason that they cannot be called stories in the 
proper sense, the reason, namely, that they are the 
very stuff of first-hand experience, they cannot be 
classified under the head of a philosophic system. 
And what shall be said of such poems as "The 
Daffodils," "She Was a Phantom," "The Solitary 
Reaper," "To a Highland Girl," from the philo- 
sophic standpoint? These poems are little patches 
of transcend£ntal beauty, born of the overflow of 
powerful emotions and rooted deeply in the concrete 
of memory and sense perceptions, but whose con- 
crete bases are sublimated into spiritual presences. 
And two-thirds of the beauty and the powerful 
feelings and the magic spiritualization vanish at 



PHILOSOPHY 185 

the touch of cold philosophy. In truth, ipen who 
have drawn any sort of connected philosophic sys- 
tem from Wordsworth's writings, have left out of 
account a goodly number of his best and most 
characteristic poems. Our conclusion thus far, 
then, is that a number of Wordsworth's poems 
contain, by implication, unique and profomid 
general philosophic truths, somewhat alike because 
they are touched by the same personality, but 
different because they are produced by a free, 
creative energy of the mind, and because their 
respective concrete bases suggest different phases 
of general truth. 

2. We have thus far been approaching the 
philosophic question from the standpoint of poetry, 
from the way poetry, by implication and through 
the concrete, approaches the truths of philosophy. 
Let us now look at the question of philosophy more 
purely on the philosopher's own grounds, and see 
what the poet can do with analysis. Let us take 
some general and fundamental problem of philos- 
ophy, say, the problem of free-will, and see what 
the pages of Wordsworth will contribute to it. 
The philosophic question with regard to the free- 
dom of the will may be summed up under three 
heads. First, is there such a thing as the freedom 
of the will, that is, does self-consciousness possess 



i86 WORDSWORTH 'S 

an independent, self-directing and self-developing 
power, or, is self-consciousness an illusion, a mere 
cerebration of cells, the product of a materialistic 
evolution, subject wholly to the influence of en- 
vironment? Secondly, if the philosopher assumes 
that man has freedom of the will, then the question 
arises : What are the grounds on which the 
assumption rests, and what are the evidences in 
favor of it? And thirdly, it is agreed on all hands 
that the will is not absolutely free. How far, then, 
and in what sense is it free? What are the con- 
ditions that limit it? 

Now, when the philosopher turns to the pages 
of Wordsworth for light, he finds everywhere an 
assumption of the freedom of the will. To instance 
an example from the Fourth Book of the Excursion : 

Within the soul a faculty abides, 
That with interpositions, which would hide 
And darken, so can deal that they become 
Contingencies of pomp ; and serve to exalt 
Her native brightness. As the ample moon, 
In the deep stillness of a summer even 
Rising behind a thick and lofty grove. 
Burns, like an unconsuming fire of light, 
In the green trees; and, kindling on all sides 
Their leafy umbrage, turns the dusky veil 
Into a substance glorious as her own. 
Yea, with her own incorporated, by power 



PHILOSOPHY 187 

Capacious, serene. Like power abides 
In man's celestial spirit; virtue thus 
Sets forth and magnifies herself; thus feeds 
A calm, a beautiful, and silent fire. 
From the encumbrances of mortal life, 
From error, disappointment — nay, from guilt; 
And sometimes, so relenting justice wills, 
From palpable oppressions of despair. 

By a self-directing faculty from within, tlie soul 
can "exalt her native brightness," and "virtue thus 
sets forth and magnifies herself." In the opening 
of the Ninth Book of the Excursion, Wordsworth 
says that this principle of freedom subsists in all 
things : 

Whate'er exists hath properties that spread 

Beyond itself, from link to link. 

It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds. 
This is the freedom of the universe. 

But he adds that "its most apparent home" is in 
the human mind. And when the facts of life — the 
fact, for example, that men, who in the morn ,of 
youth defied the elements, must vanish — seem to 
deny that freedom has its most apparent home in 
the human mind, we are still intuitively to "feel 
that we are greater than we know." As he ex- 
presses it in the address to the river Duddon, in 
the Sonnet "After Thought": 



i88 WORDSWORTH 

I see what was, and is, and will abide ; 

Still glides the Stream, and shall forever glide ; 

The Form remains, the Function never dies ; 

While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise. 

We Men, who in our morn of youth defied 

The elements, must vanish ;— be it so ! 

Enough, if something from our hands have power 

To live, and act, and serve the future hour ; 

And if, as toward the silent tomb we go. 

Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower. 

We feel that we are greater than we know. 

In many passages, then, in Wordsworth's poetry 
we find the assumption of the freedom of the will. 
But on what grounds does this assumption rest? 
interrogates the philosopher. This very assumption 
becomes the object of unsparing criticism and 
analysis by the philosopher, for it is by this method 
that he builds up his scientific and philosophic 
system. The poet can make no appreciable con- 
tribution to the problem, for at this point a sharp 
line is drawn between poetry and scientific system 
of thought. Poetry cannot be analytic, only 
synthetic. Wordsworth himself understood the 
limitations of his art in theory, although he seems 
not always to have observed it strictly in practice. 
Of the use that poetry can make of scientific 
knowledge, he says, "The remotest discoveries of 
the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist will be 



1 



PHILOSOPHY i8q 

as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon 
which it can be employed, if the time should ever 
come when these things shall be familiar to us. 

If the- time should ever come when what 

is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall 
be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and 
tlood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid 
the transfiguration and will welcome the Being 
thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate in the 
liousehold of man." It is not the business of the 
poet to make searching analyses and criticisms of 
general truths, but to wait patiently and make use 
of those that are familiarly known, to whatever 
philosophical system they may belong; to make 
them take on a form of flesh and blood ; to give 
them, as it were, a new birth ; to make them give 
us a new sense of their presence, their intimacy 
and their reality; to idealize them and make them 
liave new values for us. Thus the poet's con- 
tribution is not a contribution to the problems of 
philosophy but to life, y 

As to the philosopher's third question, how far 
and in what particular sense is the will free, the 
limitations of the poet's art prevent him from 
making any distinct or definite contribution. 
]\linute observation of many data, critical analysis 
of them, close and careful reasoning on minute 



190 WORDSWORTH 

differences — these are required to make an advance 
on the problem. The critic may say these are mere 
intellectual niceties. The literary critic is especially 
prone to say so. Even so ; but it is precisely by 
these analytical methods and by these marginal 
differences that a system of philosophy makes an 
advance on those of the past. Wordsworth's con- 
ception of the marriage of the mind with external 
nature, out of which some critics have tried to 
make a great deal, is a conception entirely too A 
general to be of service to the philosopher, and is ■ 
indeed too vague to make a specific appeal to his 
intellect. And because Wordsworth was a poet he II 
was unable to enter into philosophical minutae and 
subtilties, and was prevented from making a dis- 
tinct contribution to the problem of free-will, or 
to any other similar problem. 

The fact is, however, that Wordsworth's mind, 
with all its other tendencies, had a strong natural 
tendency toward the minute and the analytical. 
From his earliest childhood his bodily eye amid its. 



Strongest workings evermore 
Was searching out the lines of diflference 
As they lie hid in all external forms, 
Near or remote, minute or vast. 



i 



And with this exact knowledge of the lines of 



PHILOSOPHY igr 

difference in the outward world, he had added care- 
ful observation of 

Those passages of life that give 
Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how, 
The mind is lord and master — outward sense 
The obedient servant of her will. 

These passages indicate that he was familiar with 
both the sources and methods of science and 
philosophy. And in the early days of the French 
Revolution his mind was open to scientific and 
philosophic truths, from whatever quarters they 
might blow. He was extremely susceptible to the 
influences of social and political systems of philos- 
ophy. In France with Beaupy his constant theme 
of conversation was how to build liberty 

On firm foundations, making social life. 
Through knowledge spreading and imperishable, 
As just in regulation, and as pure 
As individual in the wise and good. 

But after the shock of the Revolution and his 
experience with Godwinian and rational philos- 
ophies of the times, he, from that time hence, put 
his faith in no single system of philosophy. Al- 
though his moral nature, as we have seen, pre- 
emptorily demanded moral nurture, he now declared 
his philosophical independence. His analytic and 
philosophical bent of mind, however, was not taken 



192 WORDSWORTH 

from him, and there was a long struggle between 
his artistic and analytic faculties, between the poet 
and the philosopher in him. But the poet came oflf 
the victor : 

The imaginative faculty was lord 
Of observations natural. 

His sister, he attests, helped him to attain the 
victory : 

She, in the midst of all, persevered me still 
A poet, made me seek beneath that name 
And that alone, my office upon earth. 

And yet the analytic faculties at times would persist 
in him. The results of the struggle were both Ij 
fruitful and fruitless. It was fruitful in that region 
where philosophic and poetic truth naturally over- 
lap each other. Here it was Wordsworth's good 
office to "lend his divine spirit to aid the trans- j 
fguration" of familiar philosophic truth into poetic 
truth. From various philosophies with which he 
had been familiar — now from Platonic idealism, 
now from German transcendentalism or Coleridgean 1 1 
metaphysics, which is very much the same, and 
sometimes even from the sterner and harsher i 
philosophies of determinism and necessity — he dis- • 
tilled material for various of his poems. His efforts 
were also often fruitless. Sometimes his philosophic ' I 



PHILOSOPHY 193 

material was too refractory for poetic treatment. 
Sometimes it was too analytic, arid and abstruse 
to be transfigured by the divine spirit of the poet; 
and the evil results of these efforts were three- 
fold : They produced a considerable body of poetry 
that is of little worth ; they furnished abundant 
material for too philosophically inclined critics to 
find in Wordsworth an articulate and scientific 
system of thought ; and their reactionary effect 
tended to harden and solidify the character of 
the poet. 

If, then, we must forego calling Wordsworth a 
philosopher in the strict sense of the term, there 
are two other things that may with emphasis be 
said of him, which these pages have tried to show. 
Namely, that he is a psychologist and a mystic — 
a psychologist of the memory and of the senses, of 
the actions of men in states of excitement, of the 
thoughts and intuitions of children ; and a patient 
reader and describer of his own moods, thoughts 
and volitions ; a mystic in interpreting the strange 
and low-breathing intuitions that lie deep within us, 
l)eckoning us into worlds of wonder, joy and 
rapture. Wordsworth was master of the following 
kinds of goings-on in the universe and in the heart 
of man — activities which, under the inspiration of 
poetry and in the light of mystic intensity, may be 

13 



194 WORDSWORTH 

conceived as subject to law, but which defy any 
scientific or philosophic systematization : 

Visionary power 
Attends the motions of the viewless winds : 
There darkness makes abode, and all the host 
Of shadowy things work endless changes — there 
As in a mansion like their proper home, 
Even forms and substances are circumfused 
By that transparent vale with light divine, 
And through the turnings intricate of verse, 
Present themselves as objects recognized. 
In flashes, and with glory not their own. 

Having given the psychological power of reading 
the mind and feelings aright, and the mystic's 
intense love of intuitive truth and suggestion, 
together with its solid foundation in the enduring- 
volitions and passions of men, one has practically 
accounted for that permanent and solid substance] 
in his work that has so constantly been praised by. 
the lovers of Wordsworth. 



CHAPTER IX 

COXXLUSION 

• 

The formation of Wordsworth's character came 
at a time of great social and political disturbances. 
These disturbances wrought profoundly upon his 
sensitive, finely moral and peace-loving nature, and 
the burden of life early lay heavily upon him. He 
not onl}^ felt the weight of great personal responsi- 
bilities, but he bore the burden of the people. He 
carried upon his heart for a time the burden of the 
people of France, later the people of Switzerland 
and of Spain ; and always felt deeply the rise and 
the fall, the successes and failures of his own people. 
He was a devotee of freedom — freedom in its 
highest and purest forms. His political sonnets are 
the finest of their kind in the language. They 
lireathe the spirit of intense patriotism — a patriot- 
ism that rises above narrowness, selfishness ana 
provincialism. What he finely says of Milton is 
true of himself: 



196 WORDSWORTH 

Thou hast a voice whose sound was like the sea: 
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free. 

With the trumpet tone of a statesman, with the 
intensity of a mystic and the fine scorn of a 
prophet, he conld denounce the avarice and selfish- 
ness of the people : 

The world is too much with us : late and soon, 
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers : 
Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; 
The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers ; 
For this, for everything, we are out of tune ; 
It moves us not. — Great God ! I'd rather be 
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea. 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 

Yet he had faith in the people. He trusted the 
general heart of humanity. He had the same faith 
in human beings as he had in himself, and his faith 
in himself was well-nigh unbounded. Upon a very 
unfavorable reception of some of his poems, he 
wrote to Lady Beaumont : "My ears are stone- 
dead to this idle buzz, and my fiesh as insensible 
as iron to these petty stings, and, after what I 



CONCLUSION 197 

have said, I am sure yours will be the same. I 
doubt not that you will share with me an invincible 
confidence that my writings will co-operate with 
the benign tendencies in human nature and society, 
wherever found ; and that they will in their degree 
be efficacious in making men wiser, better and 
happier." Sometimes this faith in his genius and 
his will faltered and the burden of his own free will 
lay heavily upon him. In the "Leech Gatherer" 
he says : 

But as it sometimes chanceth, from the might 

Of joy in minds that can no further go, 

As high as we have mounted in delight 

In our dejection do we sink as low; 

To me that morning did it happen so ; 

And fears and fancies thick upon me came ; 

Dim sadness — and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor 
could name. 

But the lone leech gatherer on the moor taught 
him the way of recovery: 

I could have laughed myself to scorn to find 

In that decrepit man so firm a mind. 

"God, " said I, "be my help and stay secure, 

I'll think of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor." 

Thus his despondency was only temporary and 
most usually he was "insensible as iron to these 
petty stings" of life. 



WORDSWORTH 



i 



But high as he had mounted in the "might of 
joy" or in the strength of his genius, he held ideals 
before himself that were beyond the power of his 
mind. And there is something almost pathetic in 
his "high endeavors" at purposes and ideals im- 
possible to realize. He would write an Orphean 
"philosophic song of truth." He would build a 
grand cathedral-like edifice, "The Recluse," of 
which the Prelude and the Excursion are parts. 
The Excursion was to be the central part of the 
building, the Prelude its ante-chapel, and his minor 
pieces, "little cells, oratories and sepulchral recesses 
ordinarily included" in such an edifice ; but the 
edifice was never completed. He set himself to be 
a teacher of mankind. "Every great poet," he said, 
"is a teacher. I wish either to be considered as a 
teacher or as nothing." But to be a teacher in his 
sense of the word meant to write an original and 
enduring kind of poetry, not with the "gaudiness 
and inane phraseology of many modern writers," 
but in a "selection of language really used by men" 
— a poetry made up mainly from the original stuff 
and first-hand experiences of human nature — a 
poetry that was to be drawn from the "common 
things that round us lie," from the common heart 
of man : 



CONCLUSION T99 

In common things that round us lie 
Some random truths he can impart — 
The harvest of a quiet eye 
That broods and sleeps on his own heart. 

The burden of his message, indeed, slept and 
brooded on his own heart. The strenuousness of 
it, the ideality of it, the mystic intensity of it, to- 
gether with the burden of his own times and his 
OAvn people, who often heard him with obloquy, 
solidified and hardened the character that was some- 
what "stiff and moody" from childhood. It tended 
to eradicate from his mind a sense of values in 
poetry. It made him "insensible as iron" to the 
"amazing inequalities' of his own works, to the 
"afflicting blocks of prose" that are there. It early 
extracted all the humor out of his naturally serious 
and somewhat juiceless character. It gradually 
accumulated a deposit of stiffness and immobility 
in his character. These were the reactionary results 
of the eft'orts of a high-minded person to carry, in 
times of revolutionary zeal, a revolutionary move- 
ment into the field of morals and literary life. 

Whatever pathos there is in some of his broken 
hopes, it is relieved by the fact that he lived an 
overcoming life. He willed mightily. He would 
not be thwarted even though his ideals were 



200 WORDSWORTH 

unattainable. He not only makes "a profound 
application of ideas to life," but he has life itself, 
abundant life, to offer. Out of the deep of his 
own heart come calls to the deeps of our own. It 
is his, as no other poet's perhaps, to make and 
retain disciples. To explain his mystic power over 
them, his early followers ascribed to him occult 
wisdom, systematic philosophy and what not. It 
is hard even now to speak of him perfectly un- 
prejudiced when once caught in the iron grasp of 
his will and the towering strength of his passion, 
but it is best to be modest. To walk with him is to 
learn humility and courage— humility in the pres- 
ence of the awful forces of life that envelop us, 
courage that steels the heart to meet calmly all 
obstacles, pain, and even death : 

A Power is passing from the earth 
To breathless Nature's dark abyss ; 
But when the great and good depart 
What is it more than this — 

That Man, who is from God sent forth, 
Doth yet again to God return? — 
Such ebb and flow must ever be, 
Then wherefore should we mourn? 

Wherefore, indeed, should we mourn, for out of 
the deep come mystic echoes and beckoning voices : 



CONCLUSION 201 

Yes, it was the mountain Echo, 
Solitary, clear, profound, 
Answering to the shouting Cuckoo, 
Giving to her sound for sound ! 

Have not we too? — yes, we have 
Answers, and we know not whence; 
Echoes from beyond the grave, 
Recognized intelligence ! 

Such rebounds our inward ear 
Catches something from afar — 
Listen, ponder, hold them dear; 
For of God — of God they are. 



I 






INDEX 



A Page 

■"Afflictions of Margaret" 147, 184 

"After Thought" (sonnet) 187 

"'Alice Fell" 103 

"Anecdote for Fathers" 45 

■"A Poet— He Hath Put His Heart to School" (sonnet) . 154 

-Aristotle 168, 180 

Arnold, Matthew 85, 166 

B 

Beaupey 56, 191 

Blois 56 

"Borderers, The" Ill 

"Brook! Whose Society the Poet Seeks" (sonnet).... 154 

Brooke, Stopford 166 

"Brothers, The" 98 

Butler 165, 175 

Byron 23, 100 

C 

Oarlyle 9 

Catholic Emancipation 9 

Catholicism 131 

Church 166 

"Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old" 93 

Coleridgian Metaphysics 19^ 

"Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendor 

and Beauty" 94 



204 WORDSWORTH 

D Page 

"Daffodils, The" 184 

DeQuincey 12 

DeVere, Aubrey 37 

Dowden 95 

e" 

"Elegiac Stanzas" 34, 157, 160, 184 

"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" 173 

Emerson 138, 144 

Excursion, The 11, 34, 44, 69, 140, 186, 192, 19S 

"Expostulation and Reply" 97. 112 

F 

"Fountain, The" 62, 184 

France 29, 191, 195 

French Revolution 29, 54, 114, 191 

G 

German Transcendentalism 192 

'Gypsies, The" 103 

H 

Hall, G. Stanley 80 

Hamlet 145, 168 

"Happy Warrior, The" 99 

Hume 1& 

Hutton 37 

I 

"Infant, The" 93 

"Influence of Natural Objects" 96 

"It is a Beauteous Evening" (sonnet) 35, 86, 98 

J 

James, William 123 

Jeffries 82 



INDEX 20S 

K Page 

Kant 168, 180 

L 

Lady Macbeth 146 

Lear 145 

'Leech Gatherer, The" 197 

"Loud Is the Vale" 200 

'Ivouisa" 99 

Lowell 141 

"Lucy" 34, 97, 155, 163 

M r 

Macaiiley .^ 82 

Macbeth 145 

"Memory" ? 107 

"Michael" 98, 147, 184 

Milton 166, 195 

"Milton! Thou Shouldst Be Living" (sonnet) 195 

Morley 113, 138, 165 

Myers 2S 

"My Heart Leaps Up" 96, 170, 172, 176, 182 

N 

Newman 131 

"Nutting" 117 

O 

"Ode on Intimations of Immortality" 76, IL'9 

"Ode Lo Duty" 152, 184 

Orleans 56 

Othello 145 

P 

"Paradise Lost" 166 

"Peter Bell' 117 

Platonic Idealism 192 



2o6 WORDSWORTH 

Page 

"Poet's Epitaph, The" 193 

Pope 12, 115, 116 

Preface to a Sonnet 21 

Prefaces to Lyrical Ballads 41, 188 

Prelude, The 10, 11, 22, 26, 27, 29, 33, 34, 

38, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 
57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 74, 77, 99, 103, 118, 119, 
120, 121, 125, 133, 159, 162, 165, 168, 190, 191, 

192, 194, 198 
"Primrose of the Rock, The" 177, 182 

R 

Raleigh 24, 184 

Recejac, E 143 

"Recluse, The" 136, 198 

Reform Bill 9 

"Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The" 130, 173 

"Rizpah" 148 

Romantic Movement 67, 101 

S 

Schopenhauer 139 

Scott 102 

September Massacre, The 56 

Shakespeare 100, 145, 146, 175, 181 

"She Was a Phantom" 32, 89, 184 

Shelley 23 

"Simon Lee" 103 

"Solitary Reaper, The" 184 

Stephen, Leslie 65, 79, 165, 175 

Swedenborg 131 

Swinburne 148, 167 

Switzerland 195 

T 

"Tables Turned, The" 113 

Tennyson 100, 132, 148 



INDEX 207 

Page 

'Thorn, The" 103 

'Tintem Abbey" 26, 31, 96, 107, 121 

'To a Butterfly" 98 

'To a Highland Girl" 154, 184 

'To a Mother" »3 

'To Hartley Coleridge" 96 

'To My Sister" 34, 112 

"To the Cuckoo" 104, 109, 182 

•'To the Lady Fleming" 154 

"Two April Mornings" 9S 

W 

"We Are Seven" 91 

Westmoreland Dalesmen 49 

"With Ships the Sea Was Sprinkled" (sonnet) 46 

Wordsworth, Dorothy 24, 60 

"World Is Too Much With Us, The" (sonnet) 196 

Y 

"Yarrow Unvisited ' 75 

"Yes, It Was the Mountain Echo" 201 



u s 



'-n^ v^ 




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A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

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Cranberry Township, PA 16066 



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